Daily Blague

One of the things that makes Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage a huge favorite of mine is that, while Virginie Ledoyen plays the woman of whom I want to be worthy - and happily, in the form of my dear Kathleen, I am married to her - Isabelle Adjani plays the woman whom I want to take advantage of me. I've been lucky enough to have Adjani types exploit me once or twice; the compensation is knowing that they don't take advantage of "just anybody."

But there is the setting, too: that awful spring and summer of 1940, when, fortunately for everybody, Americans were faced with two presidential candidates who pledged war against the fascist menace. Well, one finds one's silver lining where one can. Bon Voyage reminds us that 1940 would have been a high point in French life if it hadn't been for the Germans; never has style so completely inflected high popular culture. That's made beautifully clear in the film's opening scene, as a posh audience in a grand theatre watches the finale of a farce and applauds at the end. The lights go up, and everything is glamor, chic. Even Gérard Depardieu is polished and debonair! And I hear music. It is, however, not music on the sound track. It is Jacque Ibert's Ouverture de fête. (Give this huge file a moment to load.)

The sound track of Bon Voyage is terrific. Gabriel Yared has written an exceptionally fine two-part score, one part for the tense parts and one for the lyric. But it remains, however unobtrusively,music of today. When I listen to the Ibert, it reminds me of everything in Bon Voyage. The crowds milling about the hotel in Bordeaux, the fun and irresponsibility of Vivian Denvers's escapades. the importance of safeguarding the professor's heavy-water bottles, the heartbeats of the hero's divided affections, and the knowledge, finally, that France will come out all right - the impudent belief that failing in high style is not failure. Puritans will have none of this, I know, but I am no puritan.

No puritan could possibly like the gloriously bluesy theme that punctures the carefully if exuberantly crafted crescendo at - miracle of technology - two minutes and fifty-two seconds (2:52) into the Ouverture. Although obviously inspired by American jazz, it has a French polish and peculiarity that makes it altogether new. This is precisely what was tops about French art in the late Thirties, a taste for enjambing low-life onto the high- that still seems sound. It is somehow, at the same time, chrome and sterling.

Five minutes into the overture, a sort of melancholy seems to take over, but the appearance is deceiving, a strategy for new triumph. But note, at 6:23, the American tonality - this could, for a moment, be Ives, or, more easily, Copland. What if I told you that this overture was commissioned by the imperial Japanese court. to mark some utterly incredibly polymillennial anniversary? Events, shall we say, intervened, and the work never did become the "Japanese Overture" that it would have become without war. Of course, there's nothing remotely Japanese about it. Except, just maybe, a very high style.

In the ninth minute, this reflective part begins to gird its loins for an assault on the summit. At 11:12, the foundations of triumph begin to be laid. At 12:22, the blues theme announces victory. A few minutes later, the Ouverture ends with the kind of racket that marks V-Days. Everything elides. And I feel that I've just watched Bon Voyage again. The real Bon Voyage.