glamorous as it gets: a golden-hued playground for the likes of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant where open-top cars are cinematic law.
But today's teenyboppers have just as much pull as the idols of yesterday. The gauzy "Monte Carlo" stars not our most regal cinema heroes, but the young TV upstarts Selena Gomez (Disney Channel star, pop singer and Justin Bieber girlfriend), Katie Cassidy ("Melrose Place") and Leighton Meester ("Gossip Girl").
The 18-year-old Grace (Gomez) has just graduated high school in a small Texas town. She has long dreamed of visiting Paris, saving up tips from waitressing alongside her friend, the brassy 21-year-old high school dropout Emma (Cassidy).
Grace's mother (Andie MacDowell, in the briefest of roles) and her stepfather (Brett Cullen) are happy to let her and Emma go for a week, so long as they take Grace's new stepsister, the 21-year-old Meg (Meester). This upsets Emma because she sees Meg as a nervous wet blanket, and Grace for having a family holiday forced on her long-held dream.
In Paris, their trip sours, not because of the usual culprits (rude Parisians, discombobulating rotaries, too much foie gras) but a hyper-speed tour bus that blitzes through tourist sites and eventually leaves them behind. This (along with sudden rain) is enough to make the trip a disaster in the eyes of Grace.
She sums up the status allure of the French capital, lamenting that she's not "the kind of person" who can go to Paris.
But at that moment, the trio crosses paths with a wealthy heiress who looks exactly like Grace, because, well, she's also Selena Gomez. As Cordelia Winthrop Scott, Gomez plays a British, snobby look-alike to Grace. Urged on by Emma and buoyed by a confused hotel staff, Grace impersonates Cordelia, winning them a fancy room for the night and tickets on a private jet the next day to Monaco.
At Monte Carlo, the action generally swirls around the plush Hotel de Paris, as the girls live out a fantasy of luxury, complete with an international consortium of handsome men. Grace falls in with a young French aristocrat (Pierre Boulanger), Emma lands a dashing Italian (Giulio Berruti) while her hometown boyfriend (Cory Monteith) tries to track her down, and Meg hits it off with an Australian backpacker (Luke Bracey).
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