“Two Tickets to Greece” kicks off like too many other Grecian idylls, with a woman in need of getting her spark, zest for life, belief in love or “groove” back setting off for sunny Greece.

But this variation on a “Shirley Valentine/Mamma Mia!/My Life in Ruins/Sisterhood” theme is French and thus a bit brittle, a little eccentric and less predictable than you might think.

It’s the sort of mismatched “buddy” travelogue that passes slowly over slight misadventures and hurt feelings that accompany a tentative, perhaps ill-advised reunion of two former childhood friends. And then Kristin Scott Thomas shows up, and what was passable entertainment is unmistakably funnier, more complicated and more interesting.

Writer-director Marc Fitoussi (“Paris Follies”) first introduces us to two Meudon middle school girls — bookish, withdrawn Blandine and wild child Magalie who has come by to help her friend babysit, raid the family’s liquor cabinet and listen to the soundtrack to that late ’80s cult film, “The Big Blue.”

It’s 1989, and that mesmerizing early Luc Besson drama about free-diving has the girls obsessed. With much of it set off the island of Amorgos, Greece, that gives the tweens a bucket list item.

“We WILL go,” Blandine promises (in French with English subtitles), probably the most assertive that she’s ever been.

Thirty years later, we catch up with on-the-spectrum-bitter Blandine (Olivia Côte) as she’s muttering and fleeing a spirit-lifting improvisation class that her college-age son (Alexandre Desrousseaux) gave her as a present.

He’s about to leave for school. Her ex-husband, his father, is about to remarry, to a younger woman. Benji is worried about her, how depressed and lost she seems to be.

Stumbling across the “Big Blue” soundtrack CD, “property of Magalie Graulières,” he hears about her childhood friend, “as sassy as they came.” He sets them up on a blind reunion date.

Negative, embittered Blandine isn’t as bowled-over by the still vivacious, impulsive and irresponsible Magaliie (Laure Calamy, Côte’s co-star in “My Donkey, My Lover & I”) as the viewer is. She hears about Magalie’s casual living arrangements with a bisexual roommate and debt-dodging ways and figures “deadbeat.”

But for once she doesn’t accentuate the negative about the experience to her son. So when pressing issues keep him from joining her on that long-delayed dream trip to Greece, he gives Magalie his ticket and expects the two to get along like old times. As the trip instantly strains Blandine’s tolerance for exhuberant, “over-the-top” Magalie, how will they fare when things start to go wrong?

There’s little to this film, innocuously-titled “Les Cyclades” after the chain of islands they traverse, that suggests a knockabout farce is about to break out. Encounters with goats, surfers, archeologists and surly Greek ferry crew members don’t merit much more than a smile.

Calamy has the fun part, and her energy carries the picture and the wet-blanket character that Magalie would never have remained friends with, even if they hadn’t split up as kids. The personality clash has a muted politeness that gets in the way of big laughs.

But then they meet Magalie’s artist friend, a British woman raised French and now living with her lover on Mykonso — so of course she changed her name to Bijou. Kristin Scott Thomas lights things up in these scenes, bubbling over with an uninhibited, post-menopausal “artist type” free-spiritedness that lifts the picture’s third act.

This “Trip to Greece” isn’t an epic journey, and that includes the familiar emotional ground the characters have to cover. But the leads click, the scenery is fab and there are just enough chuckles, sweet laughs and grimaces to make it worth 100 minutes of our time in the sundrenched birthplace of Western Civilization.

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, underage drinking, pot smoking

Cast: Laure Calamy, Olivia Côte, Kristin Scott Thomas, Alexandre Desrousseaux and Panos Koronis.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marc Fitoussi. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:50