Living life with a capital L
The entertaining French romantic comedy-drama Two Tickets to Greece centres on a fortysomething woman who steps out of her conventional comfort zone.
The entertaining French romantic comedy-drama Two Tickets to Greece centres on a fortysomething woman who steps out of her conventional comfort zone and decides, reluctantly at first, to try to live life with a capital L.
Men may or may not be part of this move out of the rut. It may be nice if they are but it’s not mandatory. It’s more about realising that expiration dates – as in I’m too-old-for-that – are self-imposed and should be flouted.
The obvious cinematic comparison is the 1989 British film Shirley Valentine, starring Pauline Collins and Tom Conti. I also thought of Aphrodite’s Breath, Susan Johnson’s recent memoir about moving, with her octogenarian mother, from Queensland to the Greek island of Kythera.
This 111-minute film is written and directed by Marc Fitoussi, who directed episodes of the French television series Call My Agent! One of the stars, Laure Calamy, is also in that award-winning series.
It’s the performances of the three female leads that make this film well worth watching. Calamy is Magalie, a bursting-with-life, lemonade from lemons music journalist who would rather dance, literally on cafe tabletops, than sleep.
Olivia Cote is Blandine, a radiology technician who has been single since her husband left her for a younger woman two years ago. She hasn’t had sex in that time. She has a 20-year-old son, Benji (Alexandre Desrousseaux).
Blandine and Magalie were best friends at school. They loved Luc Besson’s 1988 film Big Blue and fantasised about living on Amorgos, the Greek island on which it is set.
But something happened when they were 15 and the friendship ended. Now, 30-odd years later, they are reunited by Benji, who tells his mother she is stagnating.
He then decides that the other passenger on the two tickets to Greece trip his mother has purchased, to make real that Amorgos dream, will be not himself but Magalie.
“You have two weeks to kill each other or patch things up,’’ Benji tells his mother. “I don’t care which.”
From here, it’s the two former best friends in Greece. Blandine has packed 100SPF sunscreen and booked luxury accommodation on Amorgos, while Magalie goes with the flow rather than the routine, or the map, or the ferry timetable.
This leads them to the third star in this three-hander, British-French actor Kristin Scott Thomas as Bijou, a hippie jewellery designer friend of Magalie’s who lives in a villa on Mykonos with her Greek artist husband.
It’s all a lot of disarrayed fun, but there is a more serious side. Magalie is a clown with a hidden sad face that is linked to Blandine, who has her own personal trauma to deal with, as does Bijou. The moments when these truths emerge are what shift this movie from comedy to drama.
Personally, I would run a million miles if I met Magalie; whereas Blandine is someone I’d like to talk to. That’s why the strength of this movie is the performances of Calamy and Cote as the former besties who are now chalk and cheese – on the surface at least. Whether you would like or dislike them in real life, you will believe they are real and you will feel for what is going on below the surface, in their hearts.