While traveling in their car through France, a married couple, Marcus and Joanna, come to terms with their relationship problems. They remember how they first met—a van full of choir girls fell off the road, and Marcus helped them get back on route, yet when one of the girls got chickenpox, he and Joanna went hitchhiking by themselves, slept over at an inn and made love. They met and traveled in the car with Marcus’ ex-girlfriend Kathy, who got married and got a kid. Marcus and Joanna got a child, as well, Caroline, but started losing that passion with time. They both had an affair. However, in the end, they reconcile and stay together.
"Two for the Road" is a bitter and somber contemplation on the difficulty of—not finding—but keeping and rejuvenating happiness in one’s life, to save it from stagnating into routine. Several scenes that depict relationship problems between Marcus and Joanna are contrived and forced, mostly in the first act: for instance, the engine won’t start, so Marcus orders Joanna to exit the car and push it, to help it ignite. Would any man seriously have a lady push his car, instead of doing it himself? Remarkably, no other tourist jumps in to help Joanna, and thus one might ask oneself: how can the viewers ever root for Marcus after that? Marcus is too much of a grouch, too often way to negative, but this is where the movie does not work: for all the great acting performances, how could any man be unhappy being married to Audrey Hepburn? She simply cannot be made annoying, nor boring; Hepburn is simply too enchanting for such a role.
Still, the film’s themes are palpable, nonetheless. One of them is that life is riddled with failure and disappointment: after their car literally went out in flames, Marcus and Joanna had to accept to stay at an expensive hotel. Marcus used an elaborate scheme to sneak apples and sardine cans into their room, figuring the restaurant in the hotel is too expensive, only to later find out that breakfast and dinner were included in the price. The movie is also surprisingly grown up in its dialogues (“...when did sex stopped being fun...?” - “When it became official”; "I don't understand sex. Why is it we enjoy it more when it means less?"), has humor (when a loud train passes by their bedroom window in the morning, Joanna looks at Marcus and jokes: "Sexy, isn't it?"), whereas it uses the “back-and-forth” structure reminiscent of the French New Wave to insert several flashbacks and ellipses in the life of the couple: in one of the best, after dozens of cars passed by the couple on the bridge, Marcus wows to God that he will always pick up hitchhikers if he ever gets a car; cut to the next scene, years in the future, of Marcus driving Joanna in a car, as they pass with their car over the same bridge, refusing to pick up two German hitchhikers. Despite everything, the movie is a celebration of the flawed humans who continue attempting to overcome all the disappointments in life, trying to re-invent happiness during dark times—because, what else is there to do?
Grade:++
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