There is a scene about ten minutes into this film that is so absurd that you have to laugh.  It's the first inkling that you may be watching a French comedy and not a serious drama.  In retrospect the entire storyline lies somewhere between Mack Sennett (of Keystone Kops fame) and Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious - 1946).  It's probably closer to the latter since it's a period piece with the film direction in a 1940s style.  Also the anti-heroine, Viviane mimics Ingred Bergman with her cocked hat and wide-eyed enticing look and the screenplay writer borrows prop ideas from Notorious.

            The film runs slightly less than two hours and it moves at a hectic pace for the whole time.  I had to take a break half way through just to calm down and reset my perspective.  It's plot driven and what a plot!  Or should I say plots, because there are many.  It begins in 1939 Paris just prior to the German occupation, a frightful time for the French, which in a perverse way sets the stage for many outrageous activities.  The characters include a famous actress, a producer, the prime minister, a scientist, a student, a writer, a criminal and spies.  The synchronicity of their interrelationship in the plotline is something to behold.

              Overall, watching this film was a unique experience and it reveals something about a French philosophy of life that takes themselves and events less seriously than Americans do.  It is a complex parody of French theater, government, politics, crime and war.  And it's a 'tongue-in-cheek' representation of the French personality in caricature.

            According to the director, two of the stars, Isabel Adjani who plays a famous actress and Gerard Depardieu, who plays the prime minister have worked together in films many times.  And after you realize what's going on, you also realize how good they are at their roles.  Adjani, for example, is an actress portraying an actress performing the role of a very young woman when in fact she is nearly 50.  A relatively new comer to the French screen plays the role of Frederic, the writer and protagonist, although, since there are so many 'protagonists' he is less a protagonist than he is the thread through this labyrinthine tale.  There is a jail scene in which Frederic meets up with Raoul, a criminal played by Yvan Attal, who is so good, he steals several scenes.  Attal is also a film director in his own right.  (Incidentally, the jail scene is based upon a true event in which the French authorities freed all the incarcerated criminals before the Germans occupied Paris.)

            Bon Voyage has been used as a title for six earlier films, so I was surprised that this film did not get a more unique and meaningful title.  But the storyline does include an exodus of refugees to Bordeaux in the south of France, which had also seen refugees from the north in the face of German threats during both 1870 and 1914.  I could understand escaping to Nice on the Mediterranean or to La Havre in the west on the way to England, but Bordeaux seems an out of the way destination.  Regardless, it seems to be historically correct.

            Reviewed February 13, 2005

            MPAA: Rated PG-13 for some violence.