Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

I thought this movie was great. Yes it is quite different from Queen Margot, but it certainly has its own merits. Music is used beautifully in the film to underscore a character's emotional state. The rather morbid subject of the film is handled with great sensitivity. This movie is a rather intense experience and as far as the emotional continuity of the film's characters goes it is a bit messy. A common experience, I find at least, when watching French "art" films. Perhaps a mere cultural difference. I would certainly recommend the film, and doesn't that Pascal Greggory look just like Bruce Willis? The movie is beautifully shot as well, Patrice is the man.

I perfectly understand the comment of the person who wrote that they needed a script. They do need better defined characters, an interesting story, a more intriguing atmosphere, more realistic scenes with recognizable reactions to human events, and perhaps something else that will make a viewer want to keep watching.

The characters in this movie are so grotesque that I kept expecting one to begin to eat another. First, the fact that people are in some kind of emotional pain does not thereby cause one to find them sympathetic - particularly when there is little attempt whatever to relieve each other's troubles. That is fine, so long as the characters are made nevertheless interesting - through their actions, their dialogue, something.

These eight or so principal characters seem to cry, rage, fight, yell, grab one another, insult one another, kiss each other, scream, slap, hug, kick -- non-stop without any dramatic build-up or suspense. It's just relentless displays of extreme emotion -

whether it's of someone truly sobbing after finding that the water in the bath is cold (yes,undoubtedly some metaphor, but so poorly done);

whether it's because someone else saw the deceased more recently than they;

whether it's because someone they fancy doesn't want to be buggered on a train;

-- or just for no reason at all.

This is awful stuff - a portrait of self-absorbed decadence without anything interesting to say - and to boot, it's excruciatingly slow because terribly muddled for a long time.

I don't at all mind working to figure out a movie - but there must be something intriguing to motivate the work. Thus, for example in Place Vendome, we don't know what is going on but it's well worth finding out. Not here - not with these characters who serve simply to embarrass those around them.

This is an ugly movie - not because the ugly side of people is realistically shown, but because characters who never become real are created -- to personify ugliness of character.

I had high hopes - and am very disappointed.

They all loved him. Jean Louis Trintignat is the focus of their love. He is dead. Love is not. The shape, light and nature of one's love for another changes from character to character. I was riveted by that puzzle that love usually implies. And Vincent Perez? Where is he? I kept waiting for him to appear in all its unbearable beauty. The film was almost over and no sign of Perez. But, I was rapidly falling in love with a young woman I had never seen before on the screen. She is not just a superb actress but a monumental beauty. Hold on a minute. I think I've seen her before. God almighty! It's Vincent Perez! Among the many delightful, thoughtful surprises of this, unusual, french import is Vincent Perez as a girl. If you let the film happen and you don't fight it. You are going to have a wonderful experience.

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.

I saw it three times in a theater, and on DVD far too many times to count. I can't recall a film that has touched me so deeply. Maybe it's the way it encapsulated every funeral I've been to over the past ten years (and believe me, there have been a lot of them.) Maybe it's the way it reflected gay life as I've known it -- which is not one in which the imitation-straight couple rules (as in that pathetic HRC March on Washington), but rather consists of a complex network of friends and lovers. Just as Chereau's "L'Homme Blesse" captured coming out as I experienced it, so does this film deal with middle-age, loss, and regret. Part of what makes it so exceptional is that Chereau refuses to privilege straights in the narrative. For once THEY are the ones who have to explain themselves. Gayness is a given. It's hard to speak of "big scenes" in a film that gives you one after another. But the one in which the mourners watch the coffin go by in a car as Jeff Buckley's "The Last Goodbye" plays on the soundtrack has got to be one of the finest of modern cinema. And the finale, where Francois (Pascal Greggory) says goodbye to everyone without saying a word breaks my heart every time.