Quote:
Originally Posted by mja345
Is there any film that is carried more by the charm of the stars than "Two for the Road"? I re-watched it this week and it struck me how much is put on the plate of Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn in that film. They portray two incredibly spoiled, inherently unlikable people, yet they never become unlikable. It's a remarkable achievement and it's a hard film to conceive with lesser talents.
Finney pulls off, IMO, what is a remarkable performance in that he portrays a character that is written as a complete a-hole, and he infuses it with a certain sarcasm and intrigue. This is a character, with the way it's written, that could have easily veered into being insufferable, but Finney is so masterful as an actor that he never lets it get close to being that. Truly a testament to what an incredible actor he is.
Audrey Hepburn is equally great in the film. Her character is written paper-thin compared to Finney's IMO. This is a character that so many actresses would allow to become an airhead, with no substance, to not allow the feelings of frustration to rise above the fortunate circumstances of the couple. But Hepburn, being one of the truly special actresses of the last 50 years, makes the character vulnerable and conflicted. And, because she's Audrey Hepburn, infuses the character with a sophistication and intelligence.
This is a film I love. You can watch it with your significant other and pass it off as a romantic film, but it's really a deep meditation on the nature of relationships. Finney and Hepburn deliver remarkable performances and bring out so much more in these characters than what in on the page IMO. There are films where scripts provide shelter for the actors, but this film is an example where actors take any deficiencies in the characters written on the page and absolutely obliterate them with their charisma.
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Not a Twilight Time release - not even a Bluray but a Warner archive MOD DVD-R that will almost certainly never be upgraded - but
The Picasso Summer makes an interesting if not entirely satisfying double-bill with
Two for the Road, largely because, in a case of buyer's remorse, that's what the studio tried to turn it into after the first cut was delivered:
Along with Alpha Beta the most obscure entry in Albert Finney’s filmography – and Ray Bradbury’s too, for that matter -
The Picasso Summer is pretty much the dictionary definition of what the French call a ‘film maudit’: a cursed film. Made by Bill Cosby’s production company in the days before he was a pariah, originally shot in 1969 by Oscar winning Sundays and Cybele director Serge Bourguignon from a short story by Bradbury (who wrote the screenplay under the name Douglas Spaulding, a character from Dandelion Wine), it’s about a couple who travel to France in the hope of meeting Pablo Picasso to thank him for all the joy his work has given them (well, him, since his wife has no real say in the matter). Picasso dropped out of the picture because of shenanigans with bullfighter, former friend and go-between with the producers Luis Miguel Dominguín and guest star Yul Brynner’s wife and, as was so often the case, Bradbury fell out with his director (his first choice had been Francois Truffaut, who dropped out after reading Bradbury’s too ‘conventional’ script) – so much so that after the rough cut was screened they actually physically attacked each other and had to be separated while Cosby stormed out of the screening room, announcing “I don’t need you people to waste my money. I’m going to go waste it myself!”
He wasn’t the only one who was unhappy. Warner Bros. were obviously hoping for another Two from the Road – it even stars Yvette Mimieux, the wife of that film’s director, alongside Finney – but got something rather different and much more experimental and hated the rough cut so much that they hired another director, Robert Sallin, and The Bill Cosby Show writer Ed. Weinberger (billed as Edwin Boyd), to reshoot and rework it – and then shelved the film, now minus Brynner’s cameo, Barbra Streisand’s vocal version of Michel Legrand’s main theme and Bourguignon’s screen credit, before eventually dumping it as a late night TV movie through their TV arm in 1972. Which was especially ironic since the project began as a proposed half hour TV special in 1967…
Of course, to be a true film maudit it has to be unfairly maligned, and it’s hard to judge if that’s the case since Bourguignon was so disgusted with the process he never made another film and its doubtful his version even exists anymore or that there would ever be enough interest to attempt to restore it. Certainly the tone and style are all over the place – some scenes use flash frames, freeze frames, split screen montages and animated sequences, other settle for lightweight picturesque sightseeing – and at times it’s obvious from the changed appearance of the leads, along with most of Dominguín’s scenes being in English but his big monologue being delivered in Spanish with an English voice over, that some time has passed between Bourguignon’s shoot and Sallin’s.
The biggest problem, as Truffaut bluntly told Bradbury when bowing out, is the script, which doesn’t delve very deep into its characters or Picasso’s work (a brief bit of Mansplaining from Finney aside), surprisingly little of which appears in the film. Where Two for the Road used its continental road trips to dissect the dissolution of a marriage as ennui took hold, this seems more sporadically pleasant travelogue than character study, emotional reawakening or investigation of art. The trip begins on a whim and even though it briefly geographically separates the two leads when Finney goes off in a sulk to Spain to try to get an introduction to the great man from Dominguín, it never really develops into an obsession so much as one of those holidays where nothing really works out. We never discover anything more about the characters than we knew in the first reel, and by the end Finney is clearly struggling with some awkward nothing dialogue while Mimieux generally fares better in the second half with less screen time.
How well Wes Herschensohn’s three animated sequences work is a matter of individual interpretation and whether you think they’re in tune with the paintings’ intentions or crass expansions (or indeed both at the same time). Certainly a case could be made for the first of them turning his War and Peace mural on its head by turning it into Peace and War to give it more drama, while the inclusion of an animated Picasso painting from live action documentary footage of death camp victims is at best problematic. Dominguín does get a scene where he explains the need to confront death in both his bullfighting and Picasso’s art as a prelude to the last of these, but it’s only in a scene between Mimieux and Peter Madden’s blind artist that the film really finds a sense of the life enhancing magic that art can bring.
The end result is gossamer thin, mostly pleasant until the lengthy bullfighting detour (and yes, animal lovers, you do see a bull tormented and killed after Dominguín convinces Finney he needs to fight a bull to understand Picasso) and pretty superficial, ending exactly as you expect it to, given some surface charm by Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography (with additional contributions from Henri Alekan and David Shore) and Michel Legand’s memorable score. Whether it was ever anything more we’ll probably never know.
To the best of my knowledge the film has only had one screening in the UK, on Channel 5 in the channel’s early days and precious few outings in the States since its original broadcast, making Warner Archive’s manufactured on demand US DVD-R the only practical way to see the film at the moment. Sadly the disc is a bit problematic: picture quality is for the most part good, with fluctuations in quality possibly down to the different cinematographers and shoots, but the 1.78:1 transfer has clearly been cropped from what was presumably the originally intended 1.66:1, with the framing too tight in some shots – it’s particularly noticeable in the split screen montages which crop the top of heads off. No extras.
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