I completely agree with the Australian's take on this movie. It is just awful. For me, perhaps the most painful thing is watching the two principal female characters be, well, so AWFUL in a light comedy. The mother has a husband and we are given nothing to indicate any problem with their marriage. The daughter has a boyfriend, to whom she is so devoted that she brings his framed photograph to place beside her bed in the Paris hotel in which mother and daughter stay.
Yet what causes them both immediately to have a fit when their bags are lost on the plane? (Ttuly within 30 seconds)? The fact that their birth control pills were in their bags. Both fully intend to have affairs immediately and to lie to their husband and boyfriend in so doing.
Why? We aren't told.
Anything charming about this? Absolutely not.
As the 50 something year old doctor who has an affair with the 17 year old daughter (the age of consent to avoid statutory rape charges in my state), the Frenchman is decidedly creepy - particularly since his fornication occurs while doing a medical exam upon her.
Yes, the girl and her mother have thrown themselves at him - but the doctor knows one is married and the other is 17 -- and has suspicions that she is the daughter of the sluttish Joanna Cassidy - who cares far more about getting to the gym than her fidelity.
This is truly a smarmy, creepy movie - mirthless, soaked in a sort of debauchery of materialistic and sexual pleasure. Yet somehow we are expected to identify with these loathsome females.
I don't know what they were thinking when they made this movie - I don't know whether it is American (some lines are foreign, e.g., the girl saying that she coudn't get down to the doctor's "surgery", an English, not an American word in this context).
Many of the lines and scenes are unlike any I've ever heard or seen.
A) The mother (now 40, who had her only child at the age of 21) is delighted to see her daughter's boyfriend stand stand before her fully nude at her home (and why does he walk about nude in front of his girlfriend's mother?).
B) The high school age daughter somehow embarrasses the mother, rather than the other way around, when she suddenly has hundreds of French francs in her possession - after having borrowed all her mother's clothes and jewelry - and refuses to say where she has been all day in a country in which she doesn't speak the language.
C) The mother's entire purpose in visiting Paris is to order new fashions for her boutique - yet seems to have no guilt in sending away designers without much of a look at their drawings - because she's thinking of the next penetration she may receive from her doctor.
This movie is very grim, very unlikeable. Don't see it.