The Voyager

The first (and last) images of this film really interested me. At the risk of spoiling, we find Faber sitting alone in a Greek airport trying to figure out what the hell just happened to him. A really depressing scene that draws you in to his web of coincidence that is the rest of the story.

Faber is a man of science that really should have a great life(he is the chief engineer on an important dam project), but his past catches up with him with a series of coincidences that play a terrible joke with his life.

Delpy is very sexy and very French. The aircraft that crashes is just as sexy. A romp around Europe rounds this great film out. Watch with your wife or girlfriend with wine - not with the guys and beer!

This is probably one of the best love stories I have ever seen because inevitably it is doomed. With a stellar cast and gorgeous scenery, the movie instantly grabs your attention. Sam Shepard as always gives an intriguing performance as Faber, a civil engineer traveling across the Europe. He has a dry wit and cynical sense of humor, seeming reluctant to make friends with his fellow passengers until he meets Sabeth played by Julie Delpy. With her charm and outspoken personality, he is soon drawn to her. The passion of their love affair and strong physical attraction makes this story all the more tragic as it unfolds. It is heartbreaking to witness the coolness and detachment which consume Faber as the realization of who this woman really is, hits him. I almost cried to see how devastated Sabeth was at Faber's rejection of her. This is a truly great performance and have always admired Sam Shepard as one of the great actors of our time. Julie Delpy does a fantastic job portraying the young woman. Also her mother gives a good performance.

I would highly recommend this film, but to a more mature audience who is not easily shocked.

The Voyager is in fact a drama that happens to use the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch as its backdrop. The director picked the main three characters and boiled down the plot to its essence which takes the viewer on a globe spanning journey of coincidences and places its main protagonist Walter Faber who is an engineer who doesn't believe in fate squarely in front of his past and down a spiral to the destruction of the life of his own daughter. Certain aspects of the movie come across as far fetched because the viewer cannot benefit from the additional information available to the reader of the book. On the other hand the movie brings across the immediacy of the tragic events much closer to home and resonate with a receptive audience. The novel and this movie try to show that life cannot be reduced to a simple formula and that the mind is not equipped to deal with the matters of the heart. In that the Voyager succeeds in translating the core of the plot. Students of the novel will of course be disappointed because the director had to cut out many scenes and aspects of the book. With that in mind we are still left with a movie that should get some emotions flowing.

In comparison with the book, the film is in a scale from 1 to 10 a 3. On a good day a 5. In my opinion, for someone who has read the book and analysed it, it will be easy to see all the awful flaws in the characters interpretation and actions. The hole set is nicely developed and explored, but a few details (in Hanna's apartment for example) don't actually match with the characters personality. The book has a high quantity of symbols and metaphors and they are almost not shown in the film at all. The importance of small details like Walter constantly shaving in the book is superficially explored in the movie. Walter's disgust to Nature isn't shown at all! I think the movie could be more exciting. The plot has every spice it needed to be really great. Maybe if the actresses could have been better chosen, since Ivy is just to old, Hanna at the end just too young.. Only Sabeth fits perfectly into her role. Congratulations to Julie Delpy, for once again performing so beautifully. About Walter: Walter's interpretation of the role is unreal and unfaithful to the book. In the film Walter is a man full of charm, seductive and caring. Where is all the distance, cold-heartiness of the book's character..? The control-freak, the workaholic character? While having sex with Ivy, Walter usually thinks about planes and turbines, but in the movie he is an amazing lover. Hanna's importance in Walter's love life is also not given enough importance. In the book walter says that only with Hanna wasn't sex absurd. She was afterall, the true love of his life. The End of the film is an open ending, in the book Walter eventually dies with Cancer, after a huge change in his vision of the world. His relation towards nature totally mutates. He becomes a different man. Important details such as symbols that warn Walter about Sabeth's death (and his own death as well) are inexistent in the film.

But in an overall, and ignoring the fact that i've read the book by Max Frisch.. I've rated the film with 6 points, knowing how old it is, and how the budget might have been, it's a nice Sunday-afternoon film, that let's you reflect about destiny.

Voyager is to be enjoyed for the characters and the actors' performances and not for the plot which is rather obvious, unsurprising, and which requires extensive suspension of disbelief. Sam Shepard is very effective but it is the ethereal luminescence of Julie Delpy that kept me riveted. She is a special presence onscreen. In addition, although the story is contrived, the relationships and issues are thought provoking and lingering.