A nostalgic rendezvous with the City of Light

It didn’t take much to lure Gena Rowlands to participate in the valentine to love and the City of Light, “Paris Je T’Aime,” which opens Friday.

The omnibus film of 20 different stories set in 18 of Paris’ distinctive neighborhoods features an international cast including Elijah Wood, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Natalie Portman, Nick Nolte and Fanny Ardant. Alexander Payne, Walter Salles, Sylvain Chomet, Ethan and Joel Coen and Alfonso Cuaron are among the directors

The producer, Rowland recalls, called her from Paris to see if she’d be interested in doing one of the vignettes with her good friends and former leading men Ben Gazarra and Gerard Depardieu

“Shooting with some of my favorite people in Paris? That’s not hard duty.”

She was sent several scripts to peruse, but she had her own idea for the episode and decided to write it herself.

In the funny, bittersweet installment, she plays an American living in Paris who has a nostalgic reunion with her soon-to-be ex-husband (Gazarra) at a cafe.

He’s in town to get her to sign the divorce papers – his young fiancee, he tells her, is three months pregnant, and he needs to marry her as soon as possible.

Weaving in and out of their discussion is Depardieu as the convivial owner of the establishment.

“I began to feel that since we were two Americans in Paris and we are of a certain age and it’s about love,” she explains, “it perhaps would be nice to show a marriage that had gone wrong, but to show in a flippant way why it had gone wrong and also why it was probably right too for a long time.”

Depardieu shared directing duties on the vignette with Frederic Auburtin. As a director, Rowlands says, Depardieu is “like he is as an actor – he’s enormously free and generous. He always seems to be having the most wonderful time.”

Rowlands first went to Paris in the early 1960s with her late husband, actor and iconoclast film director John Cassavetes.

“I can’t count how many times I have gone there,” says Rowlands, who also turns up on TV tonight in the Lifetime drama “What if God Were the Sun?,” a movie about a nurse and a terminally ill patient.

“Paris does seem to bring out the love quality in everybody,” Rowlands says. “The French are very open about what they feel. I don’t think you can grow up in a place where there is such beautiful architecture and not have it affect your life.”

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– Susan King