TWO FOR THE ROAD is a tepid, uninspired, faintly depressing "comedy" about a married couple on the edge of divorce who drive through France reminiscing about the past ten years of their marriage. It's like a very, very watered down version of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, minus the tragedy, minus the pain, minus the insights, minus the truth. Yet TWO FOR THE ROAD began life as something very different. Originally entitled "the Big Freakout," the original screenplay meant to showcase the return of screen darling Audrey Hepburn as a fiery vixen of revolution and social change. It was only when Hepburn herself read the script and began having terrible nightmares that the bland, marriage on the rocks story was concocted by studio hacks. The story opens with a preteen Audrey, squatting to urinate on the grave of Winston Churchill, who raped her mother while touring the East End during the darkest days of the London Blitz. Drooling and sneering, a stodgy MP listens to her story, calls her a liar, and then clubs her with an umbrella. Audrey is sentenced to ten years in a sadistic girls reform school. After a montage of lesbian sex, gang violence, and field hockey (all inter-cut with a scorching live UK performance of "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets) Audrey emerges from prison at the edge of womanhood, ready (as she puts it) for "loads of men, loads of fun, and loads of destruction!"Albert Finney first enters the film as a young Oxford lad presenting a paper on youth unrest in Britain. When a kindly professor suggests that the lad needs "street research" to "sharpen his insights" the gullible Finney immediately rents a cheap motorcar and goes cruising across the British countryside. The first person he meets is Hepburn, thumbing for a ride in the pouring rain while singing "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Beatles at the top her lungs. Finney and Hepburn immediately connect, having steamy sex in a barn to the sounds of "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones. But when they wake up in the morning, their car is gone! Hepburn claims to know of a fortune in jewels buried in a nearby churchyard, and she leads Finney on a desperate scavenger hunt that swiftly leads to cannibalism, necrophilia, grave robbing, and blues wailing at a local club, where Audrey sits in as vocalist with the original 1964 lineup of the Animals, reunited for a smoking set that includes "Boom Boom," "House of the Rising Sun," "I'm Crying," and "Send You Back to Walker." At the end of the set, Audrey says quietly, "I died many years ago," blowing her brains out with a concealed pistol just as the police arrive. Back at Oxford, Albert Finney presents his paper on teen violence and street crime to a standing ovation and top marks. Wandering out into the yard, he sees a beautiful wild flower growing up between the bricks, the spirit of Audrey Hepburn set free at last.

Over the years I've held an image of Audrey Hepburn as a truly superior artist and actress. I was offended at the juvenile behavior by the characters portrayed by Ms. Hepburn and Albert Finney. They both appear to suffer from ADD and be in need of ritalin.Or. if I may say so, their characters show what happens to people who enter adulthood without a moral compass and seem to be spiritually bankrupt. Ms Hepburn seems to have gravitated between two polls in her choices of roles: Either they're too serious ("The Nun's Story") or an increasingly annoying flit: ("Breakfast at Tiffany's; "Two for the Road"). Whatever the "story" is that this movie tells, it could be told just as effectively in half the time. As it is, the film drags on f o r e v e r. When it was over, I felt disappointed and disgusted--and angry for the absolute waste of two hours watching this paean to immaturity and stupidity. In an age of dumbing down of everything, Ms. Hepburn paves the way for the Paris Hiltons and Kardashians of this age. Yuck!

Like a number of Audrey Hepburn's films ("Funny Face", "Charade", "Paris When It Sizzles" and others), "Two for the Road" is set in France, but whereas those films were all set in Paris this one takes place in the French countryside. It opens with a British couple, Mark and Joanna Wallace, flying their white Mercedes-Benz roadster to Northern France. Their plan is to drive down through the country to Saint-Tropez where Mark, an architect, has a meeting with a wealthy client, the idea being to combine business with pleasure. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that there are tensions in their marriage, and the two are constantly bickering and quarrelling. As they journey through France they discuss and recall several earlier trips along the same route, especially those in the earlier days of their marriage when their relationship was a happier one.Trying to explain the plot any further would be difficult because the story is told in an extreme non-linear fashion, abruptly switching without warning between scenes set in the present and those set in the past and mingling the events of one journey with those of another. The only way in which director Stanley Donen and scriptwriter Frederic Raphael attempt to maintain continuity is, at each stage of the journey, to juxtapose scenes of the present day with scenes set in the same geographical area during previous journeys.I have been a great fan of Audrey Hepburn ever since I fell in love with her watching "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as a teenager, but even I have to admit that "Two for the Road" is both one of her weaker films and one of her weaker performances. It would seem that there are roles beyond the reach of even an actress of her talents, and the role of a wife whose husband is tired of her appears to have been one of them. Now I am well aware that in real life Audrey was twice divorced, but her screen persona, at least in her comedies- and this film is officially a comedy- was almost invariably that of a beautiful, playful, enchanting and utterly adorable girl, the sort of woman that no husband could possibly tire of unless he were either mad or a complete bastard. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, when a man is tired of Audrey Hepburn, he is tired of life. Had Audrey been able to hint at a darker side to Joanna's personality, Mark's disillusionment with married life might have been more understandable, but Joanna comes across as just as totally lovable as every other Hepburn heroine from Sabrina to Suzy in "Wait Until Dark"- and, even though Audrey was 38 when she made the film, just as beautiful.Albert Finney, by contrast, has no difficulty in playing a man whose wife is tired of him; the problem here is that his Mark is so charmless and arrogant that it is difficult to understand why Joanna should have fallen for him in the first place, or why their marriage should have lasted so long. Finney, incidentally, was seven years younger than Hepburn, which must have made a refreshing change for an actress who spent much of the earlier part of her career playing the love-interest to men old enough to be her father (Bogart, Fonda, Astaire, Harrison) or nearly so (Peck).As I said, the film is officially a comedy, and there are indeed some genuinely comic moments, ranging from the slapstick to the satirical. An example of the former is the scene where Mark and Joanna's car runs out of control down a hill and ends up demolishing a barn- that could have been something out of Buster Keaton. Most of the satire is at the expense of Mark's American ex-girlfriend Cathy Maxwell-Manchester, her pompous, priggish husband Howard and their badly-behaved daughter Ruthie. Even though the film had an American director, these scenes are based upon what were some fairly common British prejudices about Americans around this period, and doubtless explain why the film was not a great success across the Atlantic.Unfortunately, the film's comic elements do not sit very easily with its underlying serious theme, the decline in the relationship between Mark and Joanna. This theme is also undermined by the film's unorthodox structure and non-linear narrative which makes it difficult to follow the progress of that relationship or to understand what is going on. The movie was in its day considered "experimental", but not every experiment, whether in science or the cinema, is a successful one, and I was left with the strong impression that the story of Mark and Joanna is one that could have benefited from a more conventional, linear style. 5/10

Two For The Road was the last and least of the films that Audrey Hepburn did with Stanley Donen. It's a matter of taste, but I don't think it is anywhere as good as either Funny Face or Charade.The film is the story of the marriage of Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn told in jigsaw puzzle style, disjointed at different select times of their marriage and what they go through. You date it by the different hairstyles that Audrey Hepburn has and by the various cars that they drive. They're always on the road and if you know from cars and from women's hairstyle trends than you can follow the film a whole lot easier. Me, I'm not an expert in either.Some parts are quite memorable and the best scenes are with another married couple, Eleanor Bron and William Daniels and the little brat monster from hell that they're raising. Bron used to be involved with Finney and she'd like to keep some kind of tie there. But as parents the two are absolute flops, they're very liberal types who don't believe in disciplining their little sugar plum. In fact Audrey has to take a hand in there when the situation becomes intolerable.According to The Films Of Audrey Hepburn, Finney's part was originally schedule for Michael Caine. I could certainly have seen him in the role. I don't think the cinematic jigsaw was necessary. It would have been a better film just done as a straight linear narrative. Still fans of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney should be pleased.