Two for the Road

Apparently I've never done a post on Two for the Road, since a search of the blog can't find one. It's been in the FXM rotation for a little while now, with another airing tomorrow (Dec. 13) at 1:05 PM, followed by on at 11:00 AM on Dec. 14. So I made a point of watching it recently so that I can finally do a post on it here.

Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) is an architect based in London who is about to travel to the south of France with his wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) to attend the "opening", as it were, of a new house he designed for the Dalbrets (Claude Dauphin and Nadia Gray), a wealthy couple the Wallaces met on one of their previous visits to France. Mark and Joanna have been married for about a decade now, with a child who is staying behind in London to be looked after by Grandma. The two are going to make the same drive through France they have on those past vacations, with the caveat that they take an air ferry across the channel.

On the plane, we learn that the couple's relationship has gotten somewhat old and stale, as happens often enough over the course of a long-term relationship. When they get off the plan in the north of France, we flash back to a time earlier in the relationship, although the movie doesn't exactly tell us that we've flashed back. Indeed, that's the main conceit of the movie, that it flashes backward and forward to various periods of the relationship as it fills in the pieces of how the couple ended up the way they are now, on the verge of divorce even though they're going to Saint-Tropez together.

While the story is not linear in terms of time, it is, however, linear in terms of space. The couple takes pretty much the same route through France each time they go, which allows the movie to stop at one particular point (spatial) in the journey, and then move either forward or backward in time to what was happening at that particular location on another of their journeys. There are, more or less four distinct journeys:

The first one comes before the couple got married. Mark was traveling alone, but met a girls' choir of which Joanna was a member. However, much of the choir gets sick, with the exception of Joanna, which is how the two meet and fall in love, hitchhiking through France.

Some years later, after they've gotten married, they're driving an MG roadster through France. There's a stereotype of British cars being notoriously unreliable at this time (I'm not a car buff so I don't know how much less reliable they were than other cars), and the MG develops problems when a pipe falls off from the exhaust or something. Mark re-attaches it, but the mechanical problems cause the car to catch fire and be destroyed. It's when trying to dispose of the car that they first meet the Dalbrets, who are so amused by what happened that they take on Mark and Joanna as passengers in their luxury car and give Mark various architectural jobs.

A third vacation has the Wallaces vacationing together with the Manchesters (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron), friends from a ways back. Mr. Manchester is a bit officious in trying to organize the vacation down to the last detail, while they have a daughter who hasn't had enough discipline in her life and is a hellion as a result.

Finally, there's the present day, the one ten years into the marriage when the couple are on the verge of divorce and constantly bickering.

Two for the Road is a movie that some people are probably going to have problems with, thanks to the fact that it jumps backwards and forwards in time without really telling the audience. Watch the cars. But the performances are quite good despite what can't be easy roles to play. Since the story moves through both time and space, there's no good way to film the story in a straight linear in terms of time manner and then edit it into the final product; you'd have to move from one physical location back to another and that would be prohibitively expensive. In a lot of movies, there aren't such big changes in characters, but since the couple's relationship changes pretty drastically over the decade-plus of time covered, it's easy to see what makes this such a complex movie. Unsurprisingly, Finney and Hepburn are up to it.

It's also an interesting time capsule thanks to the various cars, as well as Hepburn being given typically stylish for the 1960s fashions that look firmly rooted to the 60s today. Wait for those wraparound sunglasses; I can't believe anybody considered them stylish at any time. The opening titles reminded me of Bedazzled with a similar typeface; both films had titles by Maurice Binder and direction by Stanley Donen.

If you haven't seen Two For the Road before, it's definitely worth a watch.