Bon Voyage | Review

France’s pick for Best Foreign feature manages to be one dull enterprise.

Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau moderate adventure story is like a glass of wine—drink slowly and wait for the flavors to come out, unfortunately, the wait is fairly too long and the aftertaste offers very little in compensatory highs.

Bon Voyage is a pretty film to look at, it authentically captures the look of the era with its cobble-stone streets, the social elite decadence and polite scandals, but after the brave opening which gives us an actress Miss princess and a dead body dilemma on her hands the story becomes stale from scandalous to scandal-less.

It’s Nazi Germany evading France and taking over the country in giant leaps and a bunch of the bourgeoisie from Paris are pushed to watch from the sidelines of Bordeaux, some carrying secret potions, while some are plainly secretive. Gerard Depardieu (City of Ghosts) plays the minister with a penchant for young things; Virginie Ledoyen (8 Femmes) plays the student in the middle of it all, and the writer/protagonist whose fiction becomes fact played by Gregory Derangere (La Chambre des officiers) who goes from zero to hero in 48 hours.

As is the case with the film’s introductory murder scene where plenty of questions are left unanswered it seems that the film tries to keep a catalogue of details away from the viewer, thus giving mixed results as it intricately adds little detail to the actual denouement the film. What is left besides the high level of hidden agendas are a bunch of over-dramatized or too one-dimensional performances, especially witnessed in the film’s femme fatale played by Isabelle Adjani (Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran) who falls into a category of carton-like characterizations.

While Rappeneau might have a star cast at his disposal, the director of 1990’s Cyrano de Bergerac makes little use for them except the one fun item of the film where the players are thrown in a web of interesting sets of pairings where new relationships come to surface and forgotten ones are swooped up in this sprawling goose chase with old cars and old costumes.

The disappointment comes from the lack of craziness in what is an implied emergency-like state, the film doesn’t generate any excitement, and even a prison break is evokes boredom. Bon Voyage fails to make use of the panic situations, the comedy that is interjected seems misplaced and the endless loose-ends that were never taken care of during the middle of the film are left in the hands of cardboard characters–it makes for one long haul.

Viewed in the French language.

Rating 2 stars