Two For The Road (15.)
Directed by Stanley Donen.
1967. Starring Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Eleanor Bron and William Daniels. 111 mins. Released on Blu-Ray as part of Eureka's Masters of Cinema series.
Simply for co-directing Singin' In The Rain, Stanley Donen would waltz unchallenged into any academy of Cinema Masters, though he might have to stand behind Gene Kelly in the group photo. As co-writer of Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael would find any attempt at entry being firmly repelled by the firm arm of the security man across his chest. The pair combined in 1967 to produce this oddity – a slick, glamorous 60s star vehicle about the bitter deterioration of a marriage.
The film charts the decline of Mark (Finney) and Joanna (Hepburn) Wallace's relationship over a series of road trip through France, criss-crossing between the time they met as youngsters while hitchhiking and trips taken at various stages in their marriage culminating in them as a sniping and resentful couple who chuck around threats and promises of divorce fairly casually but can't quite bring themselves to go through with it, maybe for the sake of their child or maybe because there is still some lingering affection. It's a tricksy narrative structure, rather Nouvelle Vague, but done with all the trapping of a Hollywood studio product. There's a Henry Mancini score, a Maurice Bender title sequence, two stars and most of the picture takes place in luxurious Eurotrash locations or exotic rustic countryside location. A few years earlier he had directed Hepburn with Cary Grant in Charade, a lavish Hitchockian thriller and this is like that film had been invade by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and then chopped up by Alain Resnais.
After a decade or so working in the Studio system, the mid-sixties seems to have found Donen eager to connect with the new sense of liberation and openness. (His next film would be directing Pete'n'Dud in that most modish of sixties production Bedazzled.) He doesn't quite have the touch for it though. It is supposed to be shot as a continual present tense, the different periods merging easily into one another as if time was flowing freely back and forth. The shifting chronological perspectives are indicated by some awkward associative jump cuts – a mosquito spray will cut to a shower nozzle in another time frame – and it is all just a bit too heavy-handed.
That Mark and Joanna Wallace experience marital problems comes as no surprise – they are Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, a pairing that was never going to work out. They just don't fit, do they? If you were at their wedding you'd be aying it won't last even as you chucked the confetti. Like Sharon Stone and David Morrissey in Basic Instinct 2, you never believe they could have gotten together. There's is a marriage of inconvenience, a pairing of two names big enough to get the film made so there is no pain in their break ups and slanging matches.
The pairing unbalances the film because Hepburn always attracts sympathy for her character so it makes it seem like Finney is always in the wrong. Now Finney's Mark Wallace is largely charmless, especially when he does his Bogart impression, but it does obscure the fact that on many occasions Joanna behaves just as badly. The way the relationship is written he is very much the dominant one so the fact that she is the bigger star and a bit older than him (7 years in real life) doesn't help.
In one strand of the film they go on holiday with an American couple (Bron and Daniels) and to make them seem sympathetic in comparison, the American pair have to be the most ghastly caricatures. Raphael's script spells out its themes too bluntly. The first scene has them drive past a couple of newly weds. Hepburn, “They don't look very happy.” Finney, “Why should they? They just got married.” In other moments it is just too contrived. During a fight Hepburn says of Finney, “You don't know what love is …. all you can do is take the salute at an endless march past of yourself.” Now in a piece of prose that's a great putdown but as a line of dialogue that someone says in the heat of an argument it is just ridiculous. Even allowing for the idea that she has been probably storing up the line for a few weeks, the idea that she could just deliver it, perfectly worded, in a fit of anger is just too much
Directed by Stanley Donen.
1967. Starring Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Eleanor Bron and William Daniels. 111 mins. Released on Blu-Ray as part of Eureka's Masters of Cinema series.
Simply for co-directing Singin' In The Rain, Stanley Donen would waltz unchallenged into any academy of Cinema Masters, though he might have to stand behind Gene Kelly in the group photo. As co-writer of Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael would find any attempt at entry being firmly repelled by the firm arm of the security man across his chest. The pair combined in 1967 to produce this oddity – a slick, glamorous 60s star vehicle about the bitter deterioration of a marriage.
The film charts the decline of Mark (Finney) and Joanna (Hepburn) Wallace's relationship over a series of road trip through France, criss-crossing between the time they met as youngsters while hitchhiking and trips taken at various stages in their marriage culminating in them as a sniping and resentful couple who chuck around threats and promises of divorce fairly casually but can't quite bring themselves to go through with it, maybe for the sake of their child or maybe because there is still some lingering affection. It's a tricksy narrative structure, rather Nouvelle Vague, but done with all the trapping of a Hollywood studio product. There's a Henry Mancini score, a Maurice Bender title sequence, two stars and most of the picture takes place in luxurious Eurotrash locations or exotic rustic countryside location. A few years earlier he had directed Hepburn with Cary Grant in Charade, a lavish Hitchockian thriller and this is like that film had been invade by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and then chopped up by Alain Resnais.
After a decade or so working in the Studio system, the mid-sixties seems to have found Donen eager to connect with the new sense of liberation and openness. (His next film would be directing Pete'n'Dud in that most modish of sixties production Bedazzled.) He doesn't quite have the touch for it though. It is supposed to be shot as a continual present tense, the different periods merging easily into one another as if time was flowing freely back and forth. The shifting chronological perspectives are indicated by some awkward associative jump cuts – a mosquito spray will cut to a shower nozzle in another time frame – and it is all just a bit too heavy-handed.
That Mark and Joanna Wallace experience marital problems comes as no surprise – they are Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, a pairing that was never going to work out. They just don't fit, do they? If you were at their wedding you'd be aying it won't last even as you chucked the confetti. Like Sharon Stone and David Morrissey in Basic Instinct 2, you never believe they could have gotten together. There's is a marriage of inconvenience, a pairing of two names big enough to get the film made so there is no pain in their break ups and slanging matches.
The pairing unbalances the film because Hepburn always attracts sympathy for her character so it makes it seem like Finney is always in the wrong. Now Finney's Mark Wallace is largely charmless, especially when he does his Bogart impression, but it does obscure the fact that on many occasions Joanna behaves just as badly. The way the relationship is written he is very much the dominant one so the fact that she is the bigger star and a bit older than him (7 years in real life) doesn't help.
In one strand of the film they go on holiday with an American couple (Bron and Daniels) and to make them seem sympathetic in comparison, the American pair have to be the most ghastly caricatures. Raphael's script spells out its themes too bluntly. The first scene has them drive past a couple of newly weds. Hepburn, “They don't look very happy.” Finney, “Why should they? They just got married.” In other moments it is just too contrived. During a fight Hepburn says of Finney, “You don't know what love is …. all you can do is take the salute at an endless march past of yourself.” Now in a piece of prose that's a great putdown but as a line of dialogue that someone says in the heat of an argument it is just ridiculous. Even allowing for the idea that she has been probably storing up the line for a few weeks, the idea that she could just deliver it, perfectly worded, in a fit of anger is just too much
