Two for the Road (1967)
Directed by Stanley Donen
Architect Mark Wallace and his wife, Joanna, travel to France to meet with an affluent client. While there, they reflect on their first decade of marriage -- memories of when they first met, of courtship, and of road trips through the French countryside. As flirtation and playful quarreling turn to boredom with the banality of married life, the Wallaces struggle to rekindle their passion, while mutual infidelity threatens to tear them apart.
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What critics compared Two for the Road to
A less lofty, though no less charitable comparison might be made with the time-travel romance Somewhere in Time, while Adaline’s sturdy cross-cutting evokes Stanley Donen’s relationship puzzle Two for the Road; there’s even a scene here, surely no coincidence, set around 1967, with Lively driving a black convertible and meeting cute with a young man stranded on the English countryside.
For a lot of casual filmgoers in their teens and 20s -- the ones yet to encounter a Charlie Kaufman script such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or who haven't seen the bittersweet 1967 "Two for the Road," written by Frederic Raphael, or have yet to dive into a Milan Kundera novel -- the structural mind games played by the romantic comedy "(500) Days of Summer" may throw them, happily, for a loop.
Come to think of it, as with that overrated gimmick flick Memento, the only reason this movie doesn't play out in a forward-linear fashion is that it's all so structurally obvious that there would be no point (Two for the Road, it ain't).
One of my favorite films, Two for the Road (1967), had time warps that jumped in and out non-sequentially, but in that film director Stanley Donen handled the changes in a way that was charming, immediately apparent, and caused no confusion.
During the procedure itself, Kaufman probes every dimension of Joel and Clementine's relationship, bouncing around temporally like an LSD-enhanced version of Two for the Road (the great 1967 relationship study with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney).
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Raphael was the right man for the job, having penned one of the cinema's most daring looks at a marriage, Two for the Road (1967) with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney.
Based on Arthur Schnitzler's obscure 1926 novella, "Traumnovelle" (Dream Story), Kubrick and fellow screenwriter, Oscar winner/nominee Frederic Raphael (for the 1960s films "Darling" and "Two For the Road") have fashioned an intriguing story of sexual jealousy and obsession, and the repercussions of both.
Written by Kubrick and veteran screenwriter Frederic Raphael ("Darling," "Two for the Road"), "Eyes Wide Shut" follows that pattern and, like those predecessors, makes its strongest impression not with dialogue but with virtuoso visual work.
Rafael earned the film's lone nomination for his screenplay, and would go on to write a similarly effective film about a marriage in crisis, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).