Sun! Sea! Men! Margaritas! The siren song of this holy quartet is all that is required to tempt free-spirited hot mess Magalie (“Call My Agent” star Laure Calamy) to pack her bags and join her estranged former schoolfriend Blandine (Olivia Côte) on the holiday of a lifetime. The invitation has come courtesy of Blandine’s teenaged son Benjamin (Alexandre Desrousseaux), who believes, with good reason, that his recently divorced mother is in danger of becoming a recluse — and she wasn’t exactly the life and soul of the party to begin with. The stage is set for a pleasant if meandering comedy-drama powered by the personality clash at its core.
“Two Tickets to Greece” opens with a prologue establishing the contrast between these two women as teenagers, and it’s perhaps not strictly required, since this dynamic is telegraphed loud and clear in every glance, line and scene in the movie. But it is necessary to make sense of the film’s best scene, which flirts briefly with a less realist mode of filmmaking.
As the scene in question begins, the hapless pair have ended up in a low-key bar full of old archaeologists. Naturally, Magalie decides to liven things up, getting up and dancing on her own and on the tables. So far, so every movie you’ve ever seen about a free-spirited wild child scandalizing her stuck-up chum. But there’s room for a lovely little touch, whereby Magalie dances briefly behind a pillar, and the person who dances out the other side is the actor we recognize as teenaged Magalie. We’re seeing her through Blandine’s eyes, and it has the quality of a memory, but also gestures toward the way that it’s hard, even in your 40s, not to superimpose younger selves over our interactions with people we’ve known for a very long time — that knowledge of the younger version is baked in, sometimes unfairly.
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Writer-director Marc Fitoussi paces his film in a relaxed fashion; you wouldn’t need to cut much actual plot to shave 20 minutes off the runtime. And if these cuts could be focused on the first half of the film, that would mean we’d get to Kristin Scott Thomas sooner, which would be a good thing. It’s fun to see the woman so frequently cast as the epitome of steely British reserve let her hair down, literally, as a hippie jewelry-maker called Bijou who lives with her Greek artist boyfriend Dimitris (Panos Koronis) in Mykonos.
Bijou is cut from the same cloth as Meryl Streep’s dungaree-wearing Donna in “Mamma Mia”, the kind of character latter-day Andie MacDowell has made a speciality — not the kind of personality you immediately associate with Scott Thomas, but she brings unexpected dimensions to a character that could be a bit of a stock type. Whoever decided to approach Scott Thomas and see if she fancied stretching a different muscle is to be applauded.
Despite occasional detours into darker themes, this is fundamentally a relaxing trip for an audience — ideal for women of a similar age to the main characters who might fancy treating themselves to a trip to the Greek islands without actually having to get on a flight.
