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What could be more pleasant than driving from Cannes through Provence to Lyon and beyond with Diane Lane?

That's apparently what Eleanor Coppola, making her narrative writing and directing debut at 81, was thinking as she made "Paris Can Wait," a sumptuously photographed road trip that becomes a dramatically inert journey of self-discovery.

Lane plays Anne Lockwood, wife of Hollywood producer Michael Lockwood (Alec Baldwin). The Lockwoods are devoted to each other, but she's feeling the strain from the demands of Michael's work. He's practically glued to his cellphone, putting out fires on far-flung movie shoots from their hotel in Cannes, where the film festival has just ended.

Anne is suffering from an earache, which keeps her from joining Michael on a private plane to Budapest, where he has to check on one of his films. His business associate Jacques (Arnaud Viard) offers to drive Anne to Paris, where she and Michael were planning to go next.

Jacques, Anne soon discovers, is an odd traveling companion. He likes to play tour guide, commenting on landmarks and local history. He also likes to stop every hour to stretch and have a smoke. And if there's a nice restaurant and it's getting late, why not book a couple of hotel rooms and stay the night?

Anne is at first bemused by Jacques' idiosyncrasies and the way he always knows someone — usually an attractive Frenchwoman — at every place they visit. But after a while, she becomes impatient with his rather elastic view of time and suspicious of why he was so eager to get her alone for a couple of days.

Anne, we learn, is at a personal crossroads. She recently closed her dress shop, her daughter Alexandra has just started college, and she isn't sure how to keep herself occupied when Michael's busy. Her current hobby is photography, and she's constantly snapping pictures with her point-and-shoot of food, fabrics and anything else that strikes her fancy.

An observer might make the intellectual leap that Anne's life experiences mirror those of the filmmaker, herself the spouse and muse for a movie legend, Francis Ford Coppola. (Eleanor famously shot documentary footage of Francis during the making of "Apocalypse Now," which formed the basis of "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse." She also directed behind-the-scenes documentaries for Francis' "The Rainmaker" and daughter Sofia's "Marie Antoinette.") If so, Eleanor Coppola keeps introspection at arm's length, focusing more on Anne's dinner menu than her midlife reawakening.

Such emotional reserve is especially frustrating because it gives Lane, a passionate and charismatic actor, little to do with the role. Mostly, she plays Anne as a tourist, watching Jacques' flirting with the same anthropological interest as she applies to a museum exhibit.

For the cast and filmmakers, "Paris Can Wait" probably was a nice excuse to reunite with old friends (Lane starred in Francis Coppola's "The Outsiders," "Rumble Fish" and "The Cotton Club" in the '80s and played Stella in a 1995 TV movie of "A Streetcar Named Desire" to Baldwin's Stanley Kowalski) in a gorgeous Provençal setting. For the rest of us, the movie is a pretty travelogue but little more.

Twitter: @moviecricket —

HH

'Paris Can Wait'

A movie producer's wife travels through France with her husband's business associate in this pretty but empty travelogue.

Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.

When • Opens Friday, June 16.

Rating • PG for thematic elements, smoking and some language.

Running time • 92 minutes.