BON VOYAGE

BON VOYAGE

The setting of an adventure comedy in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France may appear to be odd, until you think about how “Casablanca” found humor, irony and courage in a similar situation. Not that “Bon Voyage” is another “Casablanca,” but it shares a certain cynicism, and also brings together politics, science and the movies. It also contains one of Isabelle Adjani’s best performances, as a movie star who will do anything, say anything and sleep with anybody to further her career and then save her life.

This is a sumptuous, expensive period production by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who also made Gerard Depardieu’s rabble-rousing “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1990) and the exhilarating “The Horseman on the Roof” (1995). Depardieu returns for “Bon Voyage,” looking not like his usual messy haystack self but astonishingly slimmed down, with hair trimmed and slicked back into a cabinet minister’s tailored suits.

The action begins in Paris as the Nazis are moving in and many wise citizens are moving out to Bordeaux; they figure it might be Nazi-free for at least a while. Adjani plays Viviane Denvers, a great movie star who appears to have been an even greater lover. To say she looks much younger than 48 is not flattery but mere fact; Adjani could play a convincing teenager in “Camille Claudel” (1990).

Here her character acts on pure animal instinct: She is drawn to men who can offer money or safety. The problem is that she also falls in love with men she loves. This becomes very complicated during the course of this film because what she needs is money from one man for safety with another while staying in love with a third.

At the beginning of the movie she attaches herself to harassed cabinet minister Jean-Etienne Beaufort (Depardieu). As some ministers are urging collaboration with the Nazis, he orders up a car and she joins him on the exodus. But then she sees a childhood friend named Frederic (Gregori Derangere) in the street amazed, because she thought he was in jail, charged with murder.

What happened is that her power over men is so great that some days earlier, after murdering a blackmailer in her apartment, she called him and he allowed himself to be arrested by the police because he had always been in love with her. He is free now because his jailers helpfully let their prisoners go early.

So there is a man to take care of her and a man for her to take care of. And let us not forget Alex Winckler (Peter Coyote), who seems to be a journalist with much influence and who is mesmerized by her. Can we trust him? He speaks with an accent, and movie fans will know he has the same last name as one of the Nazi creeps in “The Third Man.” Viviane’s strategy is to accept protection from whichever man happens to have it at any given moment, convince him she loves only him, and jump ship when necessary.

The film tells the story of a tributary that will eventually join with the main stream, although at first we can’t see how. It concerns an émigré Jewish professor named Kopolski (Jean-Marc Stehle), an intellectual unsuited by temperament to survive in such a world. He possesses several very large bottles of heavy water necessary for nuclear experiments, and wants to keep them out of Nazi hands and somehow get them to England.

(The heavy water bottles here are essentially a MacGuffin, like the wine bottles filled with heavy earth in Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” 1946.) Prof. Kopolski’s last hope is a young assistant named Camille (Virginie Ledoyen) who rises to the occasion, saving both him and the heavy water from Nazi capture; she transports the bottles in the back of a station wagon, where they look as though they’re sure to break any second.

There are other characters too lots of them including a bunch of rich aristocrats and tourists who keep turning up at all the hotels, demanding what can’t be had. But farce crossed with action oiled by romance is the movie’s underlying structure, and Rappeneau and his four co-writers are virtuosos at keeping all their balls in the air. The characters’ lives and fates crisscross; their motives are subject to sudden adjustments; Viviane is like Eliza on the ice floes, leaping from one man to another.

But this movie isn’t funny in a ha-ha way; it’s funny because it surprises us with delights and blindsides us with hazards. There is much contrivance here after all, it is unlikely that these people would not only constantly cross paths but always do so at moments of crisis but once we accept its method it implicates us: The sudden separations and reunions are devices for testing Viviane’s powers of romantic invention and Camille’s desperate improvisations. There is also the amusement that men, especially powerful men, are powerless in the hands of a woman like Viviane. Their mistake is to love someone who loves only herself; their excuse is that she loves herself so much she loves them too, or can make them think she does, which comes to the same thing.

I haven’t even mentioned the costumes, sets or atmosphere of “Bon Voyage.” If Rappeneau’s “Horseman on the Roof” was the most expensive French film ever made up to that time, this one must be right up there. He doesn’t use the money to manufacture a big, clunky entertainment but to create a world that seems real all the way out into the farthest corners of Paris and Bordeaux hotels, cabinet meetings, boudoirs, dark roads and desperate rendezvous. This is a grand and self-assured entertainment; it knows Adjani and Depardieu and all these others are powerful performers and it knows itself.

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