Focus on French Cinema - French Film Festival of Greenwich

2007

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	Director : Jean-Paul Rappeneau
	Screenplay : Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Patrick Modiano, with Jérôme Tonnerre, Gilles Marchand, Julien Rappeneau
	Director of Photography:Thierry Arbogast Music: Gabriel Yared
	Cast : Isabelle Adjani : Viviane Gérard Depardieu : Beaufort Virginie Ledoyen : Camille Yvan Attal : Raoul Grégori Derangère : Frédéric Peter Coyote: Winckler
	Running time: 1h 56 min Production: France, 2004 Rating: PG 13 Distributor: Sony Pictures Classic ›› www.sonyclassics.com
	Awards: Best Director, Cabourg Romantic Film Festival (2003) Most Promising Actor, Grégori Derangère & Best Cinematography, Thierry Arbogast, Cesar (2004)

Bon Voyage

Introduction by Geoff Field , Professor of European History at Purchase College
Q&A with Geoff Field

Sophisticated farce
At the start of World War II, the fate of the free world hangs in the balance at the posh Hotel Splendide in Bordeaux. Cabinet members, journalists, physicists, and spies of all persuasions gather in order to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris. High society socialites hobnob with jailbirds. Murderous intrigues, scientific secrets and love affairs flourish.
In Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s BON VOYAGE, elaborate personal schemes and political plots escalate, intersect and fly off in all directions, as a young man (Grégori Derangère) must choose between a beautiful diva (Isabelle Adjani) and an impassioned student (Virginie Ledoyen), between politicians and hoodlums, between carefree youth and adulthood.

The movie is funny not in a ho-ho way but in the way it surprises us with delights and blindsides us with hazards. (…) This is a grand, confident entertainment, sure of the power of Adjani, Depardieu and the others, and sure of itself.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-times

Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau ("The Horseman on the Roof") vividly recreates the snarled side streets, the crammed hotel lobbies, the rumor and panic: One of the great pleasures of "Bon Voyage" is its evocation of a precise time and place in history.
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Bon Voyage, a rich, teeming French farce set in and around Bordeaux in 1940 on the eve of the German occupation of Paris, is a triumph of narrative ingenuity.
Stephen Holder, New York Times