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Bon voyage - Isabelle Adjani, Grégori Derangère, Virginie Ledoyen, Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Threat advisory: High - High risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

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 Frédéric (Grégori Derangère) must choose between beautiful diva Viviane Denvers (Isabelle Adjani) and impassioned student Camille (Virginie Ledoyen), between politicians and hoodlums, between carefree youth and adulthood.

Persons of interest

  • Isabelle Adjani .... Viviane Denvers
  • Gérard Depardieu .... Jean-Étienne Beaufort
  • Grégori Derangère .... Frédéric
  • Virginie Ledoyen .... Camille
  • Yvan Attal .... Raoul
  • Peter Coyote .... Alex Winckler
  • Jean-Marc Stehlé .... Professor Kopolski
  • Aurore Clément .... Jacqueline de Lusse
  • Xavier De Guillebon .... Brémond
  • Edith Scob .... Mrs Arbesault
  • Michel Vuillermoz .... Mr Girard
  • Nicolas Pignon .... André Arpel
  • Nicolas Vaude .... Thierry Arpel
  • Gilles Marchand .... Adaptor
  • Julien Rappeneau .... Adaptor
  • Jérôme Tonnerre .... Adaptor
  • Patrick Modiano .... Screenwriter
  • Jean-Paul Rappeneau .... Adaptor, Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Hee, hee, hee.

Bon voyage is a funny French World War II romance comedy with Nazis, spies, secret technology, secret agents and just plain old secrets. Enjoy.

Security censorship classification

M (Low level violence)

Surveillance time

115 minutes (1:51 hours)

Not for public release in Australia before date

Film: 3 June 2004

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Production notes

The filming of Bon voyage not only turned into a labour of love for Academy Award nominated director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, but also an exploration into a pivotal period from his youth - the turmoil that besieged France at the beginning of World War II. Since his first film, A matter of resistance, Rappeneau has been exploring possibilities to return to this era.

"I have long thought that as political leaders, the French establishment and the social elite all squeezed into one or two Bordeaux hotels, a film idea certainly lay dormant," says Rappeneau. "And then in one of the numerous books I was reading on that period I discovered that in the days preceding the German occupation of Paris, the French government decided to empty the prisons. I clutched at a potential beginning - a guy's in prison, he gets out, Paris is a ghost town, and he goes to Bordeaux in search of the person who unjustly caused his imprisonment."

And so Bon voyage began to take form.

From the very beginning, writer Patrick Modiano could feel that this was going to be a special film for the award-winning director. "From the very moment Jean-Paul spoke to me about this project, I felt it was especially close to his heart, and that this would be his most personal film. Describing those chaotic few days when the entire French government and those motley, crazed masses stormed into Bordeaux was not for him a simple exercise in style. I think he had been circling around this subject for a very long time, because he was a child at that moment - one of the many children who witnessed that chaos, without understanding any of it." To put the film in a historical context, Bon voyage takes place in June 1940 at the beginning of World War II as the Germans are invading France. Paris is bordering on a chaotic state and the French Parliament abandons the city to regroup at the Bordeaux. Of course, the rest of Paris follows suit, leaving the bustling city virtual deserted while throwing the Bordeaux into a frenzy of activity.

"Amidst this strange concentration of caravans arriving at the Bordeaux," Rappeneau recounts, "I thought there was room to spin a delirious tale, a mad waltz of characters."

One of the characters that Rappeneau saw as a silhouette of his former self is Frédéric, played by Grégori Derangère. The former lover of the screen star Viviane (Isabelle Adjani), he is thrown in prison at the expense of his own goodwill. A young man who hasn't completely grown up yet, he carries around his "first love" with him - it's an adolescent love for Viviane that he refuses to let go of, even though it no longer exists. While that love is his sole reason for being, it is not until he takes his life in hand that he realises how he can also be a man with his own dreams and desires.

Rappeneau modelled Viviane after the actresses of that period. "Thanks to him, I became Viviane," gushed Isabelle Adjani, who found the role extremely fulfilling. "Viviane loves celebrity, and all that it implies - the social status, the luxury, the lovers. She cannot renounce those things; they mean too much to her. And she's ready and willing to go anywhere with anyone to hold on to them, as she does with Beaufort (Gérard Depardieu) to the Bordeaux."

The experience of working with Jean-Paul Rappeneau was incredibly fulfilling for Gérard Depardieu, who embodied Beaufort, the political statesman. "Everything Jean-Paul does is the result of a huge amount of collective work. He's a filmmaker I adore. He reinvents the cinema the way it should be. I'm staggered by the quality of the film - the precision of the set design, the casting, the lighting - in recreating that period." Linking all these characters together is Camille (Virginie Ledoyen), the young scientist's assistant who is on the adventure of her life. Rappeneau credits Camille as introducing a scientific and strategic element into the plot that transcends the simple story of these collective characters. "I read about the adventures of Irène Joliot-Curie and her team hastily making off with the research secrets of the College of France before the Germans marched into Paris," says Rappeneau. "And I knew I had found my 'linchpin' to guide the story."

Ledoyen found inspiration for her character through Rappeneau's dedication and enthusiasm for the film. "He is childlike and has a contagious gaiety. Yet, at the same time, he's extremely rigorous and meticulous. He knows his film by heart, he's seen it, imagined it, heard it, and he directs the actors word by word. It was a relentless ballet."

Helping Frederic escape from prison and eventually introducing him to Camille is Raoul, played by Yvan Attal. "He's a sympathetic thug," says Attal, "maybe a little clumsy with girls but endearing, I hope." Rounding out the principal cast was the only American actor in the cast, Peter Coyote, who played the German spy/English journalist Alex Winckler. The character of the spy was Modiano's idea. "Before the war," says Modiano, "there were some Germans in Paris who were very adept at speaking French and for the most part, they took jobs as writers or journalists. They spoke French perfectly and fit right into Parisian society, often as the lovers of actresses at the time. In our story, we portrayed a completely fictional spy, but it's all quite plausible, it all could have been true."

In the process of drafting the script, Modiano wrote up a mock novella of 50 pages that recounted, still with somewhat hazy characters, the story that he and Rappeneau invented. In developing the story further, Rappeneau followed his strategy of successive collaborations with several writers, all who he felt enriches the basic scenario.

"I profoundly believe in the virtues of a 'multi-layered' screenplay," states Rappeneau. "Jérome Tonnerre, then Gilles Marchand, contributed - each in his own particular way - a new perspective and new ideas. So that, through this ongoing dialogue and a sequence of drafts (there were five in all), the script builds, little by little, in strength. I wrote all those drafts with my son, Julien, who has now become an indispensable writing partner."

The production stretched 20-weeks, with almost 1400 individual shots in Bon voyage. As with all of Rappeneau's films, even in a seemingly simple scene, there's always an element that complicates everything - the rain, the smoke, or crowds of extras whose individual actions must be meticulously synchronised.

According to Rappeneau, the film is always funnier than the script. "Everything goes up a notch. When I was casting or hiring people, I'd give them the script to read, saying, 'This is going to be a comedy.' And I was often told, 'But it's not that funny.' I don't know why people don't know how to read. Maybe on the page, it just doesn't have the rhythm and pace that the material takes on in performance. For example, there's a scene at the beginning of the story where Frédéric goes to Viviane's apartment. She's completely stressed out, yet he's oblivious to all that. That gap in their moods had me in stitches as I was writing. I saw it would be funny. Behind the very simple dialogue that's exchanged, it was already a comic scene. But you have to know how to read it."

Rappeneau has said he wanted to treat this brief period of total confusion with a comic rhythm, yet in a way that remained faithful to the reality of that experience. As those few days in Bordeaux in June 1940 unfolded in real life like a comedy (in the most literal sense of the word), an overwhelmed government and a hodge-podge of social classes didn't know which way to turn; it was a veritable pageant of vanities on its last binge.

Modiano couldn't help but sum up his experience on the film as a delight. "Working with Rappeneau, it was clear that this subject matter allowed him to unleash his particular talent to the point of incandescence - that is, the art of storytelling. Destinies cross in a dizzying brouhaha. And the entire world is set adrift under the astonished gaze of two young people. I think we put a lot of ourselves into Frederic and Camille."

Rappeneau adds, "We didn't make a 'historical' film. It's far from that. But the film is fuelled by everything we know, and you will not find two people with more knowledge of and connection to that time period than Patrick and I."

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