Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (DVD)

Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (DVD) ... ... / DVD released 22 January, 2001 at Artificial Eye / Features of the DVD: Letterboxed, PAL, Widescreen / Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train marks a change of genre and setting after Patrice Chéreau's last film, the lurid and sweeping historical drama La Reine Margot (1994). But here too he gives us a story of familial violence and emotional extremes. The train-takers in this classy French drama of extended family relations are the friends, relatives and ex-lovers (of both genders) of the deceased Jean-Baptiste (Jean-Louis Trintignant plays both the dead painter and his brother), a depressive Parisian painter, fond of Francis Bacon, and a conduit, he sometimes thinks, for the voice of Satan. The first section gets good mileage from putting contrasting and sometimes squabbling people in a confined space to see what happens. Mostly they out themselves as troubled types (there are problems with drugs, illness, failing and new relationships), because they're like that anyway, and because their dealings with the exploitative old painter haven't helped. Like most dramas of family life in times of crisis, especially the French ones, it's a pageant of dysfunction, maybe given a touch more colour by the bohemian setting. As the film continues, the cast swells to include other relatives and friends who arrive at the funeral at Limoges. The film partly resembles Festen, in that a familial get-together occasions the unveiling of secrets and lies. But compared to Festen, the revelations are less shocking, if only because the ramparts of respectability are very shaky from the word go. Chéreau's visual style has its handheld moments (though it's never as austere as Festen), but there's a classical rhythm to the revelations, some of which emerge in powerful set pieces. The bust-ups feel necessary, and they usher in a more upbeat ending, of which the transsexual Viviane (Vincent Perez) is the guardian angel. Viviane seems to stand for the possibility of leading a more authentic and inventive life. --Peter Swaab