Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train [DVD] (1998)

A film by Patrice Chereau, my immediate response is to note that if this is the French way of death, then I intend dying in Scotland - any friends and family who might care to attend, please make your way there (get the train if you must) and at least pretend to think kindly of me.

A minor painter, promiscuous heterosexually and homosexually, has died. He was a manipulative user of people throughout his life and he's taken this last opportunity to exact emotional tribute from friends, family, and former lovers. He has died in Paris, where he fled to escape any involvement in the family shoemaking business in Limoges, but he is to be interred in the family plot back in the provinces. His Parisian mourners catch the Limoges train, and for the first section of the film, find themselves trapped in the confined space of a couple of carriages where they are forced to greet or ignore one another. They are all carrying emotional baggage, the legacy of their memories of and scars caused by the painter. There are animosities aplenty, there are sexual jealousies, drug dependency, and emotional and mental health problems to be unpacked and thrown in one another's faces.

Arriving at Limoges, they will meet up with the family who got left behind, the provincial cousins, and the twin brother of the dead man who hovers at the graveside like a spectre. He has been cursed with carrying on the family business, until it goes bankrupt and he is left with a huge house and its store of curses and memories. The train passengers will quit the huge necropolis in which the funeral takes place, head to the family home, and several will spend the night there, exposing more pain and more wounds.

This is an enigmatic film. Half way through I decided I was bored and disinterested, but I couldn't switch off. Frankly, this family make the Munsters and the Adams's look functional role models for fundamentalist marriage and parenthood - just pick your own fundamentals! They are a decidedly unlovely crew, but, somehow or other you start feeling a degree of sympathy for some of them. Somehow it becomes a very compelling story, without ever becoming a narrative you can follow with any certainty.

It is amazingly disjointed - you have to try to follow a dozen storylines, try to remember who is who and who was having a relationship with him, her, them, and how and where and when the relationship ended, or did it? It's like an old fashioned roundabout - you catch glimpses of people riding past on the wooden horses, eavesdrop on them, capture an image of them, then they're gone and another figure appears. It is intense, demanding viewing, made even more difficult if you have to depend on the subtitles and try to keep up with the machinegun rate of fire of dialogue without losing sight of what is happening visually.

Visually it is beautifully filmed and beautifully lit. There is an eclectic soundtrack, much of it rock based, but subtle. The cast are superb. There are some wonderful performances, perhaps notably by Vincent Perez, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Sylvain Jacques, Charles Berling, Pascal Greggory, and, of course, the old warhorse, Trintignant.

So, not an easy film to watch, and not an easy story to follow. Anyone offended by gay scenes should avoid it. But it does explore relationships viciously, and it does evoke an emotional response. The use of the train, with handheld camera and a real sense of movement through landscape while confined within narrow space, is an outstanding piece of cinematography. There are some surreally funny moments, largely involving the coffin and its journey to Limoges. Disorienting, disturbing, it is nevertheless a film which I ultimately found well worth watching. Can I say I enjoyed it? I don't know. I'm certain that I was impressed by it, I'm certain that I was impressed by the cast. Would I watch it again? Probably, because I think this is a film you need to see more than once to start appreciating the interplay of the storylines.

Jean-Baptiste, an unpleasant painter, is dead. His family and friends have to travel to Limoges for the burial. And what a family; nary a one of them appears to be happy or settled. The opportunity to kick off at a funeral seems irresistible to one and all. Yet for all their apparent excess at the heart this is a film about sad people saying goodbye to someone who damaged them more than they care to say. Even grasping that point I found it very hard to care.

I would recommend giving it a wide berth unless you are unnaturally happy and want to curb this