Two for the Road (1967 film)

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This article is about a 1967 movie. For the Lost episode see Two for the Road (Lost)

Two for the Road

Directed by	Stanley Donen
Produced by	Stanley Donen
Written by	Frederic Raphael
Starring	Albert Finney Audrey Hepburn William Daniels Eleanor Bron
Music by	Henry Mancini
Cinematography	Christopher Challis
Distributed by	Twentieth Century Fox
Release date(s)	1967
Running time	111 minutes
IMDb profile

Two for the Road is a 1967 movie directed by Stanley Donen about the twelve-year relationship between an architect (Albert Finney) and his wife (Audrey Hepburn). The movie was considered somewhat experimental for its time because the story is told in a non-linear fashion, with scenes from the latter stages of the relationship juxtaposed with those from its beginning, often leaving the viewer to extrapolate what has intervened, which is sometimes revealed in later scenes. The screenplay, written by Frederic Raphael, was nominated for an Academy Award.

The film's theme song, Two for the Road, was composed by Henry Mancini, with lyrics by Leslie Bricusse. (The lyrics are not heard in the film.) Mancini, who composed many famous theme songs for films, including Moon River for Breakfast at Tiffany's, considered Two for the Road his favorite song.

« What kind of people just sit in a restaurant and don't say one word to each other ? Married people » or « They don't look very happy. Why should they ? They just got married » are sentences that we can hear in the movie directed by Standley Donen that dates back to 1967, « Two for the Road ». It features Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as husband and wife and is a reflection about marriage and its ephemeral side, about the decline of passion. Through its road-movie’s cinematic genre, we follow the couple’s life at different stages of their story, and complicity, dispute and love scenes intermingle and succeed to each other on a French scenery. By expressing the cynism that married people can feel towards the future of their relationship, the film seems audacious at a time when divorce was still a delicate subject : protagonists clearly give us the feeling that something has been lost in the course of the years, something that they probably will never find again. They have the conviction that nothing exciting could ever happen again between them, they don’t delude themselves anymore and don’t expect anything from each other anymore. Besides what we could call the meaning or the reflections that emanate from the movie, this latter is a delight, with great actors, with humour and with a very sharp sense of repartee through the fabulous lines. The movie stands all the more for an original one with its non-chronological order of the scenes which was really new at that time - it’s Joanna Wallace, the character played by Audrey Hepburn, who symbolizes the point of reference of the film’s chronology thanks to the evolution of her mode and hair style (which stands for specific periods). Nevertheless we tend to think that the filmmaker is eager at ending his movie on a pretty optimistic point of view, showing us that in spite of the ceaseless dissatisfactions and of the disputes, the couple need each other and feel lost without each other, the symbol of the husband always forgetting his passport while the wife always finds it back being a relevant key for illustrating this idea …