Virginie Ledoyen – Have a good trip: “Rappeneau, I love it!”

This 2003 drama, also starring Yvan Attal and Isabelle Adjani, will return this evening on Arte.

In 1939 in Paris, Viviane Denvers (Isabelle Adjani), a renowned actress, kills a Parisian financier. Frédéric (Grégori Derangère), a young man madly in love with her, takes the crime in her place and is imprisoned. Thanks to Raoul (Yvan Attal), he escapes and flees like everyone else to Bordeaux in June 1940.

At the Splendid Hotel in Bordeaux, Viviane Denvers places herself under the protection of her lover Minister Beaufort (Gérard Depardieu), who sympathizes with Pétainist ideas. On the train that takes Frédéric and Raoul to Bordeaux, they meet Camille (Virginie Ledoyen), young assistant to Professor Kopolski (Jean-Marc Stehlé), a Jewish scholar with knowledge that could help the Germans. She must therefore help her mentor to leave France urgently.

Frédéric gradually falls in love with Camille. He helps him by taking the professor to London. They meet again a little later in Paris and declare their love for each other, while Viviane Denvers changes protector, preferring a Nazi journalist who takes her back to Paris.

Have a good tripof Jean-Paul Rappeneau, won the prize for best director in 2003 at the Cabourg Romantic Film Festival as well as three Césars in 2004 for best scenery, best cinematography and best male actor. A prize awarded to Grégori Derangère.

In 2015, then on displayEnraged by Eric Hannezo, Virginie Ledoyen had revisited for First her filmo, and she had only tender words for this director and for this film which had not found its audience at the time, but which according to her deserves to be (re)watched.

Belonging to the subgenre of “occupation film”, Have a good trip had the imagination, the speed, the actors (and actresses!!) to be a hit. It could have, it should have, but remains one of the most violent and unfair failures of French cinema.

“Rappeneau, I adore him. He is atypical, singular, there is no other like him, and it's not going to happen tomorrow. He doesn't belong to any of the chapels of French cinema. It transcends them. The strength of the film is its 'the greatest circus in the world' aspect, its frenzied rhythm, Modiano in the script… A film like that is pure mechanics.

Rappeneau is a metronome, with him, everything is precise, the text, the comma, the slightest word, how you should walk, walk quickly, speak, speak quickly. Nothing escapes him. His film is held from start to finish. For me, filming with Adjani or Depardieu was very impressive. They built my taste for cinema. Adjani in Possession still stands out, just her incredible beauty is something quite crazy. But it didn't feel like a passing of the baton between generations. It's just that Rappeneau is timeless. You can't tell if he's a filmmaker from another era or a contemporary one. And that’s probably part of what confused the public.”

Virginie Ledoyen: “Cinema creates encounters”