Bon Voyage Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)May 19th, 2004
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
BON VOYAGE
Written and Directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau
In French with subtitles
Rated PG-13, 114 minutes
Isabelle Adjani was 19 years old when she made her mark in Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. Here we are thirty years later, and she hasn't aged a lick. But once you've finished raving about Adjani's eternally youthful beauty, and Thierry Arbogast's lyrical cinematography, and Gabriel Yared's lush score, you're left with a frenetic romp of a movie packed with characters and coincidences, oozing energy from every pore and straining mightily to deliver a boffo good time.
That the movie is a melodramatic farce set in France in the onrushing shadow of the Nazi occupation is not the problem. We've had fun with the Nazis before, from Ernst Lubitsch's sparkling To Be or Not to Be to television's Hogan's Heroes, and the period of that war is as fair a game for farce as any. The problem here is that writer/director Jean-Paul Rappeneau (The Horseman on the Roof) dedicates himself to packing these reels so full of stories and characters and coincidences that he never gets around to winning our hearts and minds. There are love stories here that would perhaps like to be mentioned in the same breath as Casablanca, but they don't stand a chance amidst the nonstop busyness.
Viviane Denvers (Adjani) is a French movie star, the toast of Paris and irresistible to men. One of them follows her home after the gala premiere of her new movie and presses his no-longer-welcome attentions. There is an unfortunate accident, and another of the lovesick swains, the handsome and idealistic young writer Frederic (Grégori Derangère) gets a late night phone call to dispose of the body. He gets caught and takes the rap, while she enters into a protective liaison with the powerful Beaufort (Gérard Depardieu), a Minister in the government.
When the Nazis roll into Paris, the government takes a powder, heading south to Bordeaux. In the confusion of the German entry, Frederic breaks jail in the company of a crook named Raoul (Yvan Attal), and they too head for Bordeaux. On the train they meet pretty graduate student Camille (Virginie Ledoyen) and her mentor, the distinguished scientist Kopolski (Jean-Marc Stehlé), who is trying to smuggle a case of heavy water (a key ingredient in the making of an atom bomb) out of France and into England before it falls into the hands of the Nazis. Lurking on the scene, his interest evenly divided between Viviane and the heavy water, is Nazi agent Alex Winckler (Peter Coyote, speaking a handsome French.) They all converge, along with a few hundred other characters, on the elegant Hotel Splendide in Bordeaux, where new alliances, romantic and practical, are formed, and confusion reigns.
If this sounds chaotic, it doesn't begin to describe the disorienting level of chaos that the picture delivers. Rappeneau lavishes unstinting effort on the look of the picture, and with the collaboration of production designers Jacques Rouxel and Catherine Leterrier he marvelously evokes a sense of Paris and Bordeaux in 1940. But his sense of detail does not extend to his characters, who are left to make what impression they can as they pop up to the movie's surface like corks in a choppy sea.
The actors are all good. Derangère won the César (the French Oscar) for Most Promising Actor (which sounds much better in French: Meilleur Jeune Espoir Masculine, or Best Young Male Hope). Depardieu, who earned his only Oscar nomination in Rappeneau's greatest film, Cyrano de Bergerac, gets less attention here, but he's a reliably solid performer who knows how to make his presence felt. Adjani, in addition to her improbable beauty, delivers the movie's best performance as the spoiled and self-centered but not unlovable actress who is at the eye of the storm. Ledoyen (8 Women) doesn't manage as well in making an impression amidst the reigning chaos, but she's pretty and appealing. Ledoyen, incidentally, was not yet born when Adjani made her memorable film debut.
Rappeneau is a solid pro – he was Oscar-nominated forty years ago for his screenplay for That Man From Rio – and he provides a diverting entertainment here. If it's sometimes too diverting, much of it still passes the time in an agreeable way. It has the feel of something hastily resolved, a train barreling through the countryside and suddenly it's our stop, and we grab our bags and pile off with a minimum of goodbyes, not quite sure where we've gotten or how we got there.
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