Bon Voyage
It's a bit of a sandwich: a movie taking place in the early 1940s, dealing with the deadly serious events surrounding the French government's capitulation to the invaders, but told in the capering, helter-skelter style of a period screwball comedy. And it works, mostly, although you may feel a little ashamed of yourself in the morning. This is a film lover's film, and as if to underscore the point, "Bon Voyage" opens and closes in a movie theater. Viviane Denvert is herself a creature of the movies, an idol of the French cinema with a string of conquered men behind her. Isabelle Adjani plays her wearing a Paulette Goddard wig and with a very funny attention to the kind of movie star vanity that believes in the eternal drama of the subject's own life. Shortly after we meet Viviane, she has shot a lover dead and pinned the murder on an old flame, but what else can a poor girl do if she's to avoid scandal? The old flame, a young man named Frederic (Gregori Derangere) ends up in jail, but escapes when the prisons are emptied on June 14, 1940, as the Nazis enter Paris. He ends up catching a train for Bordeaux along with what seems like the rest of the country: descending upon the sleepy coastal city are French politicians, wealthy Parisian twits, lower-class refugees, fleeing physicists . . . and one beautiful film star. Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau ("The Horseman on the Roof") vividly recreates the snarled side streets, the crammed hotel lobbies, the rumor and panic: One of the great pleasures of "Bon Voyage" is its evocation of a precise time and place in history. Against that backdrop, Rappeneau places his gallery of fools and lets them chase each other around. There's Viviane, of course, and her new lover, Minister of Justice Jean-Etienne Beaufort (Gerard Depardieu, with slicked hair and distant demeanor). Frederic is joined by his jailmate, a happy-go-lucky con man named Raoul (Yvan Attal of "My Wife Is an Actress"), and two acquaintances they've met on the train: elderly Professor Kopolski (Jean-Marc Stehle) and his bookish, luscious assistant Camille (Virginie Ledoyen). The Professor has a cargo of "heavy water" he needs to get to England; a government minister would help him escape; Frederic knows Viviane, who knows that minister. There's still that little matter of her framing him for murder, and of the randy playboy nephew (Nicolas Vaude) of the deceased, and of a reporter (Peter Coyote) with an ace up his sleeve. And so we're off to the races. Rappeneau spins the complications at top speed, and his actors occasionally get so out of breath that the gimmickry pokes through. But he has a wonderful goose of a leading man in Derangere, who makes Frederic a flummoxed beanpole -- Jacques Tati in Peter Krause's body -- and Ledoyen transfixes the camera in her every scene. Gabriel Yared's score swoons with just the right mixture of kitsch and commitment; the composer of "The English Patient" and "Cold Mountain" has yet to let us down. It's also hard to complain when a director juggles so many story lines while maintaining an epic sensibility, even if the balls stay in the air too long. "Bon Voyage" keeps going and going, as though Rappeneau couldn't slow the merry-go-round, but unforgettable images flash by: the provisional government holding session in a schoolroom, the senators wedged into children's wooden desks; the Dickensian sprawl of a refugee apartment; the banks of the Garonne River at dusk, crowded with people whose backs are against the wall. And you have to give the director credit for the way "Bon Voyage" eventually flowers into sober feeling. What starts as a boulevard farce has, by the end, ripened into a darker awareness of the prices of freedom, and everyone gets it but Viviane -- she doesn't even recognize de Gaulle when she hops into a car with him. Adjani plays it expertly: The tide of chic comedy recedes until the movie star's the only one left who thinks her feet are still wet. Viviane's not of the world but of the movies that "Bon Voyage" whispers farewell to, and it both damns her and ennobles her.
Video
