L’Homme du Train (The Man on the Train) | Review

Pass on this train and take the TGV.

‘Astronaut’, ‘fireman’, ‘doctor’, ‘police officer’, ‘rock star’- these are some of the professions that are instantly answered by the likes of a 5-year old when asked “what do you wanna be when you grow up?”. I guess somewhere we end up driving a milk-truck for a living or working as a used car salesman. Some forget these fond childhood fantasies, but then there are those who don’t. The Man on the Train (L’ Homme du Train) illustrates how some people never let-go of these romantic notions.

In a very convenient fashion, a split-second chance encounter in a drug-store brings our two protagonists together, one is not from the area, -a small village with cobble-stone streets where people don’t bother to look their doors. Like night and day they contrast one another, the man in the leather coat goes by the name of Milan (Johnny Halliday) and appears to be a vagabond of sorts-his scruffy look and his low-brow demeanor and emotion-less face make him look to be a gunslinger outlaw traveling from one town to the next. The other man-(way past his prime) is a local professor-a lonely man looking to make more than just simple conversation. At times he comes off looking like an annoying mosquito- but gradually the two befriend one another-there relationship balances on this mutual respect based on this confidentiality between two old and sometimes lost souls. Filmmaker Patrice Leconte’s film examines the theme of regret-of not living life to its potential to basically just do the things that we wanted to have done but haven’t which is beautifully put into context in a scene where the old man finally gets his sister to admit to having spent her life with an “asshole” husband.

Visually the characters are revealed with a tight floating camera. The script makes Halliday into a man of few words, and this makes him a very mysterious figure from the start. The let-down is that the character loses all appeal with these distracting subplots of his curb-side meetings with a bunch of non-looking or threatening bandits who look disappointingly like a bunch of buffoons. Perhaps, by keeping the viewer in the dark about the true nature of his back-story it automatically adds the weight to the character and makes him more of a mystery and the subject of fascination, thus adding profoundness to his new found friend’s complete admiration of his criminal side. Instead, this guy gets room and board and offers his advice on how to be a “bad guy”. This bad guy persona carries into many of the film’s “moments” one scene sees him playing in front of the mirror in a DeNiro Taxi Driver type pose in front of the mirror and in another scene he vividly describes a painting with Cowboy and Indian war cries clobbering up his imagination.

The insufficient quality of the film comes within the odd relationship, where you get the sense that time is up for these players-being both at the end of the rope. What lacks in this film is that there are not enough moments such as the gun range shooting cans sequence or the lunch time rebellion of the 80 year-old which would attempt to dig deeper into the dynamics of their relationship, and unlike La Fille Sur le Pont, their isn’t enough tension in a relationship that definitely merits one. It appears as if Leconte would rather texturilize the images in somber colored blues and browns overcoats and stick to what is being said rather than what is not being said. The final half of the picture gets the nap-time story out of its drudge but shifts into this gear that overuses the dramatic tension. The characters may have bid their adieus but the film keeps them linked cinematically paralleled opera with a splendor of images in slow motion-, which comes across feeling a little bit overly dramatic and over-stylized and could be compared to an old western shoot-out. And when the flatlines takeover the narratviely sluggish film you can’t help but feel relieved.

French with English Subtitles

35mm

Rating 1.5 stars