Voyage à deux

The two here are Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney at their prime. The road is the bumpy road of relationships and marriage. As this couple travel this rocky road you, the viewer, observe how a charming, charismatic couple can change and evolve and hurt one another while still being in love. Stanley Donnen, director, does a masterful job in moving things along. The storyline is not linear. You get to see the couple a various times in their relationship revisiting them at crucial stages. The result is an engaging film that demands your attention. The European setting is romantic, the humor balancing the pathos of their life, and the viewer coming away with perhaps some universal truths of what it means to be connected. Audry Hepburn is class personified and Finney, in a word, a hunk!!!

The way those Manchesters tolerated and refused to discipline their bratty child Ruthie so resembled real life parents I've known who excuse their brat's behavior with "He's going through a phase" or "He has issues." OMG "issues" and "phase" my eye! Both parents and the child should indeed should be slapped. Sheeesh.

In 1967, Audrey Hepburn had gotten into the "swing" of things by being with Peter O'Toole in "How to steal a million" and did not want to go back to being in flops like "paris when it sizzles" or wearing the same old Givenchy clothes. In this film you see a change in her, a new haircut, clothes from the grooviest designers of Mod London and elsewhere like Mary Quant and Paco Rabanne, you see her eat! eating casually bread, grapes;making funny noises,etc. you actually see her having fun in this picture.She plays Joanna Wallace who with her husband played beautifully by Albert Finney reflect on the good times and the bad times of their twelve-year marriage.This film is must see because it goes beyond the happy ending and into actually imitating life where marriage is not always perfect. where marriage has fights and arguments and sometimes infidelity and hurt but love usually conquers all.must see.

I think that Audrey Hepburn's portrayal of Joanna is her most intense, subtle, and mature. We see her progression from college co-ed to married woman with child, all over the course of about 14 years. In the beginning she is a woman without experience and falls for the boyish charm of Albert Finney. During the course of their marriage, it is she who evolves as she copes with being a parent and with his philandering. This movie portrays what happens to women who enter relationships as innocents, who deal fairly and faithfully with their husbands, only to be done dirt. Had this movie been made twenty years later, we may have seen Joanna progress to a life without Mark and perhaps claim her own identity separate from his. The only movie contemporary to "Two for the Road" that deals realistically with a woman being trapped in a marriage with a cheating spouse is "The Happy Ending" with Audrey's contemporary, the underrated Jean Simmons. I think that "Two for the Road" kind of craps out at the very end by simply devolving into a madcap Swinging 60s frolic, as we see the characters kiss and make up and ride off into their high-end Euro trash sunset.

Thank God that Audrey Hepburn made this film before slipping off into an extended temporary retirement. Was she too old for this movie? Not for the segments that deal with the latter part of the married relationship. The movie spans eleven years and, yes, it is a bit of a visual stretch to see a 37 year old Audrey portraying a 22 year old college woman, but her performance throughout was nothing short of brilliant. This film was a tremendous departure for her. In Two for the Road she does not play the part of the doe-eyed delicate creature of her earlier movies. She even abandoned, reluctantly, her trademark Givenchy wardrobe to sink her teeth into a gritty, visceral part. Many critics of the time remarked on its art house appeal, due in large part to the back and forth sequence editing and the clever juxtaposition of similarities, parallels and contrasts in scenes spanning eleven years. The film must have been incredibly fresh and jarring in its day, abandoning a linear narrative approach to the history of a marriage. Even today it comes across as very "contemporary." Albert Finney delivers an equally strong performance. There is genuine chemistry between Finney and Hepburn. The viewer sees all that is wonderful and horrible about the dynamics of a couple that comes to realize that despite mutual infidelity they still love each other and belong to one another.