It's no accident that Woody Allen is mentioned twice in this film and American attitudes towards France. It is a Woody Allen film (without Woody) -- and one of the good ones, at that!
Adolph Green, who was a writer behind the screenplays of some of the very best fifties musicals (On the Town, Singin' In the Rain, The Band Wagon, and It's Always Fair Weather), plays the Jewish misanthrope here, and it's a nice alternative to Allen's identical schtick. Green even gets to sing some of the songs he wrote with Betty Comden (and which won him seven Tony awards) in this film!
Green plays an old-school comic strip creator à la Al Capp. His girlfriend is played by the always dependable Linda Lavin. His daughter, played by Laura Benson, wants nothing more than to distance herself from these oh-so-American, oh-so-bougie origins. So she moves to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and aspire to everything she thinks of as French. When Green and Lavin come to Paris (where the cartoonist is honored in a gallery show), the pieces are in place for family drama, cultural dissonance, and a darn good time.
On the French side, Gérard Depardieu plays the daughter's favorite intellectual who just happens to love the work of her father. Micheline Presle is his mother, who patiently puts up with her famous son dragging American celebrities through her country house. Her observation: "Americans confess; the French explain." The cartoonist, for his part, decides that "everything in this country is supposed to be hard to understand!" (Neither is wrong.)
I was taken by surprise once again by mon chere Alain Resnais, and this ranks as one my favorites among his oeuvre. It certainly was the biggest surprise among his hyper-intellectual explorations of memory and artifice.
You may have a hard time getting ahold of it, but I recommend you try.