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List Price: $29.95 | | Label: Sony Pictures
Salesrank: 13162
Released: August 17, 2004 |
| Our Price: $39.85 |
| Used Price: $7.00 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Occupied France the subject of a deft, breezy comedy? Believe it. Bon Voyage gathers a collection of romantics, fools, and survivors, and puts them together in Bordeaux in 1940. Loosely arranged around the ditzy figure of a famous grand-dame actress (Isabelle Adjani), these hapless creatures trip over each other very amusingly during the course of a couple of frantic days. The central character is actually a young writer (the winning Gregori Derangere), who's torn between panting after the actress or aiding the pretty daughter (Virginie Ledoyen, 8 Women) of an important scientist trying to escape to England. It would be hard to say that any of this amounts to anything substantial, but director Jean-Paul Rappeneau whips it together very attractively, and the Bordeaux location offers luscious views of a pre-war city. Rappeneau's delightful 1966 comedy La Vie de Chateau, set in Normandy just before D-Day, treads some of the same turf. --Robert Horton
Bon Voyage Reviews:
Tedious at times 
2009-06-08 - Some slapstick comedy as the Nazis prepare to conquer France in 1940? Yep, but it's all a bit forced, with the usual litany of madcap mistaken motivations. It's clouded by some nonsense about a scientist who has discovered "heavy water" which could be made into atomic bombs if the Nazis get it. The several romances here lack heat. It's fun to imagine that Bordeaux was like this before the war, though. I had to pause this many times over several days to get through it.
Fine moviemaking 
2008-12-16 - My wife and I enjoyed this wonderful movie. The acting is superb, the script never dull, and the photography is simply beautiful. You can't go wrong with this one. If you want to see another great movie by French director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, try The Horseman on the Roof starring Juliette Binoche. It is a masterwork.
Listen to Rappeneau's Commentary The Second Time You See This DVD
2008-12-12 - The first time that I watched this movie, I enjoyed it for its beautiful Art Deco sets and its pre-war fashions as worn by well chosen actors, playing in this 30's style screwball comedy.
The movie showed Parisians who were trapped in Bordeaux as they chose the "roles" they would "play" during the war -- as collaborators or resistance fighters -- splitting the society of their country into shards.
If you just watch this movie this way, it's worth a 3 or 4 star rating. If you then watch the whole DVD over again, this time with director Jean-Paul Rappeneau's voice-over commentary, the movie will be worth a 5+ star rating.
Why?
One: This core of this movie is based on the director's own memories of that time as his parents and their small children fled Paris for the south of France before invading Germans. The children that he showed in the move, were representative of himself at the same age, as he viewed most adults there becoming children before his eyes.
Thus, you can look at this movie as a historical film because it is a fictional comedy- drama set in a historical cusp -- a real time of chaos and personal choices when lives and France itself began to change forever.
Two: For anyone who loves good movies as I do, this is one of the best director commentaries that I've ever listened to, because the director tells how he made this visually complex movie with a combination of new and famous actors, and with new and old film techniques.
I watched this movie 2 and 1/2 times last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it . And I'm going to watch it again tonight.
A very uneven trip
2008-07-25 - Jean-Paul Rappeneau's disappointing but glossy and lavish comedy melodrama set against the fall of France and the birth of the Vichy government in WW2 always feels on the cusp of becoming a better film. It's full of good things but never really hits the spot, perhaps because Isabelle Adjani seems so miscast as a self-centered French movie star who uses those around her, be they screenwriters to dispose of bodies of murdered blackmailers (and take the rap when it goes wrong), ministers to get her out of Paris or German spies when needs must. Like the character, it's not s much that she's bad as that there's nothing to her - she's too much of blank here to convey such a magnetic presence. But Gerard Depardieu's malleable politician (whose final scene is the film's finest and darkest) and Yvan Attal in an underwritten part as a good-natured crook who always does the right thing are among the film's many compensations.
Not quite a mystery,and not quite a comedy, so "Bon Voyage!" 
2008-04-28 - Using the German Invasion of France in 1940 as a backdrop of historical fact, comes this odd film "Bon Voyage" that doesn't quite know what it is supposed to be....a mystery, a comedy...or really just another lifeless piece of Jean-Paul Rappeneau, again (The Horseman on the Roof). Like Casablanca, Rappeneau's film concerns people escaping the Nazi onslaught, but this time from the town of Bordeaux where all of the wealthy and connected seek refuge in the Hotel Splendide before trying to get on boats to England. Historically, I like that, but the characters and the situations that Rappeneau has created are farcical and endlessly monotonous with slim to no character development. Isabelle Adjani, as a Faye Dunnaway look- alike actress, in love (or using...who knows!) with Gerard Depardieu, Yvan Attal, Gregori Derangere and others is just plain silly. I practically wanted to get her off the screen. The business of the professor and his "assistant" sneaking "heavy water" out of France....ugh! Thirteen years after Cyrano de Bergerac and this 2003 debacle is Rappeneau's last film. "Bon Voyage" is a fitting title then!
Gabriel Yared (The English Patient: Original Soundtrack Recording, Camille Claudel) has composed a really absorbing soundtrack to try to make Rappeneau's film move more than it really does unfortunately.
Not a highly suggested film in any aspect.
