‘Two for the Road‘, the 1967 film by Stanley Donen enjoys the beautiful and appropriate music of Henry Mancini, but it seems to me that it could also fit a paraphrase of the famous song at the end of a film made 12 years later, ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian‘, with a little change of text. Instead of ‘Always Look at the Bright Side of Life’, which I hear is very popular at … funerals, I would propose ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Marriage’, an appropriate title for this film that describes a stormy love relationship, but far from being a critique of the institution of marriage, is rather a tribute to it. An unusual and unconventional homage, like the whole of this film, different in theme and script from other of Stanley Donen‘s, a director that I am now rediscovering, shortly after his passing away in February 2019.
One year before this film, Claude Lelouch had made “Un homme et une femme” which enjoyed a huge audience and critical success and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and two Academy Awards. Stanley Donen takes over the idea of a film that relies heavily on a single turbulent love story and casts Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn in the lead roles. He is an architect of great talent and success, she, well, she is Audrey Hepburn, his wife, who wears toilets designed by the great fashion houses, but whose profession, if any, we do never hear about (as for most of the characters Audrey Hepburn was cast in). They travel, they meet, they fall in love, they marry, they dispute, they cheat. The style of the story is non-linear, oscillates between what constitutes a serious crisis which potentially can end the decade long marriage, and flash-backs that reconstitute the beginning and the evolution of the relationship between the two. The landscape where all this takes place is the road, the shores of the Mediterranean, France, Europe – from this point of view the film is one of the first ‘road movies’ in which the vagabond way of life (although the heroes are far from being poor) is not just a background but plays a significant role in the story.
Will the relationship between the two partners resist the erosion and the routine of marital life entered in the second decade, the professional success with the accompanying pressure, the temptation of extra-conjugal ties? The viewers will receive the answer in the film, in a relaxed manner and in a style dominated by the romantic comedy. The film wins much by the unusual way the story unfolds, letting us gradually discover the characters of the two lovers and the complications of the relationship between them. A linear narration would have been more banal. I could not avoid however the sensation of repetition. Maybe something was missing out in the plot to make the outcome more credible. The two glamorous actors play beautifully their roles. Produced in a cinematic decade that began with love stories dominated by the existentialist crises of the English films with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, or the social realism of the French New Wave films and ended with Arthur Hiller‘s ‘Love Story‘ inspired by Erich Segal‘s novel, ‘Two for the Road‘ is an original romantic film that still manages to conquer its audiences.