Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train

Twice as ambitious as an Altman ensemble yet half as accessible, this lurid drama from the French director of Queen Margot begins at full-speed-ahead and hardly slows down thereafter.

The film follows a disjointed, motley crew as they travel by train to the funeral of a condescending painter they all once loved. Director Chereau has enough faith in his ideas to incite scenes of tortuous incoherence, most in the first 20 minutes, but when the dust settles the film develops into a character-driven masterpiece in which every scene is the big one.

The ensemble is superb, especially Jean-Louis Trintignant as both the painter and his brother, and the Americanized-in-vain Vincent Perez, back in his homeland where he belongs as a sharp-tongued transsexual.

Let me say first of all that I'm not a train freak - but for train freaks, the shots on board the train were well done, there was a good sense of movement all through. Even after the funeral - and no trains, this was sustained.

I was amused at Jean-Baptiste's desire for everyone who loved him to go by train, but his coffin to be transported by car - and did have to ask if those who came to the funeral by car did it from lack of love for the dear departed or from geographical necessity? I enjoyed this film more than I expected to; it was well paced, the characters were compelling, if not exactly your average circle of family and friends.

The standard of acting was generally very good - I particularly enjoyed Vincent Perez's performance.

If it reminded me of anything, the use of a widely varied soundtrack put me in mind of some of Fassbinder's better work.

I feel this film justifies watching more than once, if only to sort out who's who and where they fit together, but, from first viewing, plenty of life, despite being based round a death.

A drama queen's wet dream. It offers up a magnificent, almost epic gloss of the melodrama of at least 14 characters. The problem is that with a Robert Altman-sized cast crammed into 2 hours (Altman would take 3 or more), and screen time distributed more or less democratically, it's hard to get to know the characters--but some are very compelling anyway. The film is narrated and edited ridiculously, as if a novel had been tossed into a blender. Most scenes feel like they're less than a minute long yet are packed with dialogue. You might wonder if the filmmakers are trying to obscure script problems by making routine exposition an unusual chore.

However, the film's melodrama is presented in a lushly dark, romantic, Gallic way. There's something heady about the experience. And the film has some extraordinary settings. The cemetery is one of the most stunning locations since Scarlet O'Hara walked through the endless Confederate dead. And the train, crowded and zipping through the French countryside, is metaphoric in an undeniably physical way. Since Americans don't support public transportation, esp. trains, this experience struck me as unique.

Hard to avoid the Wellesian overtones here which begins with a death and goes on to explore the impact of the dead man not so much on the upper-case World as in Kane but on his own lower-case world as a fairly respectable number of those whose lives he touched travel to and assemble at his childhood home in Limoges. Amazingly one of the comments I've just read suggested that next time around the director employ a scriptwriter. This comment displays an ignorance verging on the colossal given that Daniele Thompson, who co-wrote the script from her own Original idea, is one of the outstanding screenwriters in French cinema having started with a classic 'Le Grand Vadrouille' at the age of 24 and progressing through such well-received titles as Le Follies de Grandeur, La Reine Margot until she began - with La Buche - to direct her own screenplays. Be that as it may the script is right up there with the best as are the performances not least the ever luminescent Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi whose performance alone is reason enough to see this. Okay, there are strong elements of homosexuality because it's inevitable that homosexuals are very much a presence in the modern world. As a heterosexual I wouldn't have a great deal if any at all interest in out-and-out homosexual films, literature or plays but neither did the homosexual content here bother/disturb me because it was shown in context within a highly complex, swiss-movement be-jewelled story. One that bears repeated viewings.

A minor but charismatic painter dies, and his friends and lovers and family go by train to Limoges for his funeral. There is a lot of bitterness and regret and desire: sometimes sudden and apparently irresistible, and it's given a very warm and lovely treatment here. The beauty of the men and their desire for each other is attractive (one does not have to be gay, though it helps to be sympathetic). However, the whole complicated story seems to me to be soaked through with the glum assumption that everything, everything is expendable, and the only good to be achieved is in brief moments of passion, and passion inevitably fades. There is no point in holding on to anyone. Is this apotheosis of fickleness strictly a gay theme? Certainly not, but it is central here. Apparently critics have talked of something being reborn in the story, but I could see only sadness. Happy endings may often be contrived, but sometimes I suspect the ineluctable dissolution ending can be just as contrived. Perhaps I just don't get it, but all this short-term loving, this coming close only to be set drifting outward into darkness seems unnecessarily painful, and I resent being told that's the way it is.