Holidays in real life tend to go more or less according to plan, as long as your expectations are in check: airport stress, beachside rest, a day or two of lousy weather, a mild sunburn to warm you on your way home. In the movies, however, holidays tend to be life-changing adventures, spanning dramatic personal transformation, sweeping, storybook romance or catastrophic peril. There’s a reason why screenwriters are so fond of taking their characters on a little trip: the timeframe is tightened, the stakes are raised, and as in life, people feel compelled to live a little more freely and boldly than they usually do. All that, and the film gets some pretty destination scenery into the bargain.
Take the sparring married couple played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy: over the course of one Neapolitan tour, their relationship goes from humdrum to shattered to miraculously reconciled, buffeted by the unfamiliar moods and rhythms of holiday living. Or the whole subgenre of horror films that see young travellers meet sticky ends in such far-flung locales as Slovakia or the Australian outback – the thrill of the unfamiliar turns to the terror of the same pretty quickly.
