A GENRE OF THEIR OWN `LE DIVORCE'S' FEMALE STARS SAVOR CHALLENGING ROLES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Intelligent chick flicks are even rarer than intelligent movies in general. But a surprising number of them have been made by the long-running team of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Now ``Le Divorce,'' based on the popular contemporary novel by award-winning author Diane Johnson, can be added to the trio's impressive list of female illuminating productions that includes ``A Room With a View,'' ``Howards End,'' ``The Remains of the Day,'' ``A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries,'' ``Quartet'' and ``Heat and Dust.'' Focusing on two American sisters played by Kate Hudson (``How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days'') and Naomi Watts (``The Ring,'' ``Mulholland Dr.'') in Paris as they try to work their way around incomprehensible French divorce laws and notions of propriety, the tragicomic tale also features strong roles for Franco-American dance legend Leslie Caron, Glenn Close and Stockard Channing.

``Our main writer is a woman, so it would be strange if our films didn't have an involvement with the feelings and lives and fates of women,'' notes the 75-year-old, Berkeley-born Ivory. ``The older sister (Watts' Roxeanne) is a type that we've worked with before in our Indian films. We have done a lot of films about English girls who have really submerged their personalities and merge, let's say, with the country they are in and they love so much. It's the same way, a little, with Roxeanne. She wanted to be French. She's not French, she never will be, but she wants to lose herself in France. But as she says, 'You can only go so far and you can't go any further.' I thought that was an interesting thing, psychologically, to show.

``Isabel (Hudson) came on a mission to help her sister in the last months of pregnancy,'' Ivory continues. ``But she really seemed to be in a long line of American girls who just came to France to enjoy herself. She's heard about wonderful French food, she's very fashion conscious, it was a new world. And she pretty much did enjoy herself, even looking after her sister through her worst days and even though she was taken up by this suave French man and then dropped.''

He knows his women

As his descriptions indicate, Ivory thinks deeply about his heroines' inner lives - which is a far cry from the way women are portrayed in your average Hollywood ``Just Married'' comedy or Julia Roberts romance. And actresses sure appreciate the difference.

``The difference is that Jim chooses movies about character,'' Hudson, who was Oscar-nominated for a dramatic role in ``Almost Famous,'' observes. ``This movie is not a plot-driven film, it's about characters. As Naomi says, it kind of meanders through all of these people's lives and shows how they all interconnect with each other.

``And Jim gives you a lot to do,'' adds Hudson. ``He likes to make women complicated. And that's fun for an actor to play.''

``I'd just come off doing 'The Ring,' and it was a movie that was so plot-driven, although it was a good female role,'' the British-born, Australian-bred Watts confirms. ``And this movie was so little about the plot and so much about people and their lives and how they affect each other. That's what I liked about it, and, obviously, a great cast attached and two months in Paris. But she was a wonderful character who was in complete turmoil and a little bit self-obsessed.''

And, if we haven't mentioned, more than a little bit pregnant when her snooty French husband walks out on her. Ivory notes that he had trouble casting weepy and very showing Roxeanne with an A-list actress in her early 30s. Watts can't imagine what the problem was.

``That seems so weird to me,'' she says. ``This is the type of role I yearn for. I heard that other people that he offered it to were worried about being pregnant for two-thirds of the movie. But it didn't bother me at all.''

Of course, the Merchant-Ivory team's careful attention to such matters as set decoration and clothes helped make the theoretically unflattering role more palatable. Costume designer Carol Ramsey brought her customary shrewd taste to her sixth collaboration with the filmmakers.

``It was wonderful what she did with me, playing such a pregnant woman,'' Watts gushes. ``Carol didn't feel limited by that. It wasn't like, 'Oh, let's put her in a maternity dress in one color head to toe.' ''

``Yeah, but you could still fit into pants; I can't anymore,'' chimes in Hudson, who ironically is promoting ``Le Divorce'' while expecting her first baby with her husband, rock star Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes. But at least she has fond memories of her own Parisian fashion binge last year.

``My wardrobe was fabulous,'' Hudson enthuses. ``This was so much fun for me because Isabel was like a shopaholic and spent all her money on clothes. I mean, that's kind of how (she's defined); she had no direction, you know.''

Beyond costumes

The more experienced an actress is, the more grateful she seems to be for Ivory's myriad ways of bringing out women's personalities.

``James Ivory is very, very subtle in his study of human behaviors, and I think that he's very aware of the subtleties of women's behavior, whether it be 'The Remains of the Day,' one of the great masterpieces, or 'Howards End,' a magnificent portrayal of females,'' observes Caron, whose 50-year-plus movie career includes such landmark Hollywood musicals as ``Gigi,'' ``An American in Paris'' and ``Daddy Long Legs.'' ``He's extremely sensitive to behavior and, I think, feminine behavior. He's very good at directing females.''

For Stockard Channing, who plays Isabel's mother in the film, Ivory's gift goes well beyond his sensitivity to women.

``Jim doesn't have a lot of sentimental definitions of how men behave and how women behave and all of that,'' says the versatile actress, who's probably best-known these days for playing first lady Abigail Bartlet on TV's ``The West Wing.'' ``He just sort of deals with people as people, this character does that and that character does that. In our society, we deal with lots more formulaic approaches to storytelling, with all our television stuff - one daughter would have to be blond and one brunet. But those are categories that Jim doesn't even think about. He's just steeped in less-cliched definitions of who we all are, and that's sort of how he approaches things, much more the way people are in life and how they behave privately.''

In the end, you can't have a really good women's movie unless it says something true about how we all act with each other.

``They're up and down,'' Watts says of how relationships are portrayed in ``Le Divorce.'' ``It's real.'' ``They're never what you expect them to be, nor should they be,'' Hudson adds.

Watts: ``Unpredictable.''

Hudson: ``Spontaneous.''

``They take work, communication,'' Watts concludes and could just as easily be talking about Merchant-Ivory movies.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

Can we still love the French?

When director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant set out to make a film of Diane Johnson's Paris-set novel ``Le Divorce,'' they had no idea that it would be released after an acrimonious falling out between France and America over the war in Iraq.

Rather, they thought they were telling the latest in a long line of stories about how the two cultures have loved, if never really understood one another since France was the United States' key ally in the Revolutionary War.

``It's probably another example of this bewildering attachment between the French and the Americans,'' Californian Ivory reckons. ``We love France, we love the French - we say - and for 200 years this has been the case. The French are a bit bemused by this - they don't quite know why we love them. But they also love us back, I think, because they imitate us so much, and this is the place they want to come - not for long, but they want to come here. This is really a story about this mass attraction between these two societies, which is a very, very enduring one.''

Until the term ``freedom fries'' was coined, anyway.

``All this was done well before that,'' Ivory notes. ``When we went to war in Iraq, that was exactly the same time that we were cutting the negative of the film. So that really didn't come into play. It's hard for me to believe that, in this country, people would really hold it against a film that is obviously meant to entertain.''

Noting that the French people depicted in the film come mainly from a stratum of society that conforms to many Americans' stereotypical notions, actress Leslie Caron sees no reason why either culture should reject the film.

``It's just the French upper class that's like that, very protective of the family fortunes, the title, the name, the correct behavior, the appearances and so on,'' Caron, herself the offspring of a French father and American mother, says of her family in the movie. ``You'll find the same class in England and in America, so it's not unfair to the French at all. Besides, I'm sure that the French are open enough to take criticisms.''

But will Americans be open enough to want to watch French folks?

``Why should one be worried about it?'' says India-born producer Merchant. ``An artist does what he wants to do. If it is entertaining, so much the better.

``I think that the time is right that one has to understand other people for where they stand,'' Merchant adds. ``If the French opposed a certain view of America's, there is nothing wrong with that. We've opposed views of other countries all along. One can't have, every time, what you think has to be thought by another people.''

-B.S.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Le Divorce, American Style

It's a French twist for film sisters Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts

(2) ``This is the type of role I yearn for,'' says Naomi Watts, left, on playing an expectant mother abandoned by her husband in ``Le Divorce,'' co-starring Kate Hudson, right.

(3) Producer Ismail Merchant, left, and director James Ivory say the current acrimony between Americans and the French over the war in Iraq didn't factor into their new movie, ``Le Divorce.''

Box:

Can we still love the French? (see text)