When charming young American Isabel Walker (Kate Hudson) travels to Paris to visit her expat sister, Roxanne (Naomi Watts), she finds that Roxanne's philandering French husband has abandoned her at her eighth month of pregnancy. Isabel wants to help Roxanne untangle herself from the mess, but soon is enmeshed in her own romantic folly in this Merchant-Ivory comedy of manners based on Diane Johnson's best-selling novel of the same name.