Diane Lane is married to Alec Baldwin, a successful movie producer. They have a successful marriage and a daughter in her second semester at college. They are at Cannes when word comes that a movie in Budapest needs him on the scene. When Miss Lane's ear infection makes the pilot ground her, they agree she will meet her husband in Paris; his European partner, Arnaud Viard, is driving there anyway, and will take her. So, with misgivings about leaving his wife in the hands of a single Frenchman, Baldwin is out of the movie (except for a few phone calls) and Lane & Viard are off on a road trip. Of course, Viard offers a Cook's Tour of the regions they are passing through, complete with Roman remnants and far more food than anyone can eat, the perfect wines to accompany the food, and remain as photogenic as these two.
It's a chick flick, pure and simple, meant for middle-aged and older women. The food is photogenic (Miss Lane takes photos that would grace the pages of BON APPETIT) and everyone knows Viard, including the manageress of the Lumiere Museum in Lyon. It's a movie about the glories of French Cuisine and Diane Lane, and if it remains PG-rated at all times, there is the offer of a meeting at a well-known clam bar in San Francisco and a jaunt up the Californian coast and Miss Lane staring thoughtfully into the camera after Viard has left.
The director is Eleanor Coppola, the wife of Francis Ford Coppola (it's an American Zoetrope production) and if she waited until she was 80 to make her feature film debut, it makes one wonder how autobiographical a trifle (to borrow a cooking term from another cuisine) this pleasant, minor film is.
