Patrice Chéreau's film "Those Who Love me Can Take the Train" will not be for everyone, a film one cannot help but describe as "an acquired taste", even if such a statement is often branded out with too much regularity. Even then, going with it will not necessarily equate to having loved it. The film, a piece about life that happens to have that of a dead body at its core, enjoys amassing characters and gathering them into the restricting, confined space of a train carriage; enjoys depicting them speak to one another; has fun tackling homosexuality and even finds time to deal with interracial falling outs within wider circles of families still. One of its final shots, a full frontal composition of a nude transvestite getting into a bath, ought to have been more striking than it was. Is this out of the fact we've spent so much time with these issue-ridden people that we've accepted this person as a human being and do not jolt? Or is it out of the fact we forget to react out of being numb through such an intense series of dialogues.
Spliced into three very distinct sections, the film is about love; life; death and kinship - a film detailing the coming together of those who are apart of a wider family furthermore related to someone that has recently died. In continuing on after the burial, the film plays its hand and reveals that it was never about the gathering for the service et al. in the first place; moreover, it is a film about an apparently crumbling family and a series of exchanges between very aggressive, often confused, persons doing their best to deal with grief and being stuck with one another under these circumstances. It's here one pays special attention to the title: "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train", a statement seemingly made beyond the grave, a line as if uttered by the deceased in relation to those travelling to his burial at one of Europe's largest cemeteries. This infers that it was never about a family coming to terms with how they felt about the deceased, but in fact with each other: many of them here do indeed 'take' the train – everybody bar one specific individual. Now that the burial's happened, let's see what they all think of each other as the piece enters its final forty minutes.
Things are socially awkward at the beginning of the piece, starting out at such a stage before taking a bit of a nosedive anyhow. People meet at a station bound for the city of Limoges, where the said burial will happen for an elderly relative who made his way through life as a painter. Things are chaotic, finding everybody and getting everybody on is a struggle in itself; the train rocks around, nobody has anywhere to go – two young men find solace with each other in the toilet compartment; children are difficult to control and a woman strains to talk about her drug addiction problem. Away from the train, Roschdy Zem's character Thierry shoots down to the cemetery in his estate car, coffin in tow. He's aggressive and we're aware of what chaos he would have brought to the proceedings on board the train. He picks up hitch-hikers that have no relevance to the narrative and later allows his rage to get the better of him en route.
We sense Chéreau could be producing better. They have a decent ear for dialogue and they spread the screenplay around a table consisting of either gender; various races, people from different backgrounds and of stark ages. Later on, when the family arrive at this huge graveyard, there is a neat cinematic flourish involving camera and sound working with one another in a way that doesn't happen at any other moment in what is a two hour film. Chéreau feels as if he's reigning things in, playing things down – they seem to be going out of their way to create something more neo-realistic, something that's stripped of mostly all the things synonymous with mainstream film-making (regardless of nation) and more inclined to veer into territory more associated with a brand of cinema people can find frustrating and alienating, even though there is ultimately lots going on on-screen.
As stated, the approach to break the film up into distinct chapters consisting of the travelling to the burial; the process of burying said relative and then what essentially materialises as the 'wake', which is the chief point of interest here. For a film with the approach that places so much emphasis on a group of people congregating out of the fact someone in their wider family has died to carry on after the funeral itself, in spite of the triumphant aforementioned flourish once at the place we all sense will be the setting for the finale, is unsubtle at worst. I'm not sure if the film has as much energy as it thinks it does, and there are large sections of play whereby very little neither happens nor is necessarily that important. Where visually, and in terms of bare content, the film does flounder its overall thematic stands it in good stead for the long run. This is a mature film going about a serious subject matter in a fashion that screams for artistic recognition, but one that is far from perfect.
Spliced into three very distinct sections, the film is about love; life; death and kinship - a film detailing the coming together of those who are apart of a wider family furthermore related to someone that has recently died. In continuing on after the burial, the film plays its hand and reveals that it was never about the gathering for the service et al. in the first place; moreover, it is a film about an apparently crumbling family and a series of exchanges between very aggressive, often confused, persons doing their best to deal with grief and being stuck with one another under these circumstances. It's here one pays special attention to the title: "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train", a statement seemingly made beyond the grave, a line as if uttered by the deceased in relation to those travelling to his burial at one of Europe's largest cemeteries. This infers that it was never about a family coming to terms with how they felt about the deceased, but in fact with each other: many of them here do indeed 'take' the train – everybody bar one specific individual. Now that the burial's happened, let's see what they all think of each other as the piece enters its final forty minutes.
Things are socially awkward at the beginning of the piece, starting out at such a stage before taking a bit of a nosedive anyhow. People meet at a station bound for the city of Limoges, where the said burial will happen for an elderly relative who made his way through life as a painter. Things are chaotic, finding everybody and getting everybody on is a struggle in itself; the train rocks around, nobody has anywhere to go – two young men find solace with each other in the toilet compartment; children are difficult to control and a woman strains to talk about her drug addiction problem. Away from the train, Roschdy Zem's character Thierry shoots down to the cemetery in his estate car, coffin in tow. He's aggressive and we're aware of what chaos he would have brought to the proceedings on board the train. He picks up hitch-hikers that have no relevance to the narrative and later allows his rage to get the better of him en route.
We sense Chéreau could be producing better. They have a decent ear for dialogue and they spread the screenplay around a table consisting of either gender; various races, people from different backgrounds and of stark ages. Later on, when the family arrive at this huge graveyard, there is a neat cinematic flourish involving camera and sound working with one another in a way that doesn't happen at any other moment in what is a two hour film. Chéreau feels as if he's reigning things in, playing things down – they seem to be going out of their way to create something more neo-realistic, something that's stripped of mostly all the things synonymous with mainstream film-making (regardless of nation) and more inclined to veer into territory more associated with a brand of cinema people can find frustrating and alienating, even though there is ultimately lots going on on-screen.
As stated, the approach to break the film up into distinct chapters consisting of the travelling to the burial; the process of burying said relative and then what essentially materialises as the 'wake', which is the chief point of interest here. For a film with the approach that places so much emphasis on a group of people congregating out of the fact someone in their wider family has died to carry on after the funeral itself, in spite of the triumphant aforementioned flourish once at the place we all sense will be the setting for the finale, is unsubtle at worst. I'm not sure if the film has as much energy as it thinks it does, and there are large sections of play whereby very little neither happens nor is necessarily that important. Where visually, and in terms of bare content, the film does flounder its overall thematic stands it in good stead for the long run. This is a mature film going about a serious subject matter in a fashion that screams for artistic recognition, but one that is far from perfect.