Also this issue: Family Natters A nebbish-out-of-water classic gets hit with the useless remake stick. -Ryan Godfrey Screen Picks -Sam Adams New Shorts Continuing Shorts Repertory Film Showtimes

May 22-28, 2003

movies

Pros Poem

Here's johnny: Hallyday, post-dismount, in The Man on the Train.

Old hands Johnny Hallyday and Jean Rochefort make beautiful music together.

by Sam Adams

"There are only two stories," Leo Tolstoy famously wrote. "A man goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town." In Patrice Leconte’s The Man on the Train, we get both stories, but the longer they continue, the more we begin to feel that they are, essentially, the same.

The Main on the Train opens, sensibly enough, with a man on a train: spike-haired, leather-jacketed Milan (Johnny Hallyday), whose demeanor suggests that he's lived several lifetimes and isn't too happy about any of them. Finding his bottle of migraine pills empty, he steps off the train in a town so sleepy that, even though the sun's just begun to go down, he barely makes it to the pharmacy before it closes, and once he's out, can't find a single place to get a glass of water. (They've given him soluble pills by mistake.) Trundling around this provincial village, Milan looks absurdly out of place, the iconic image of him striding alongside the railroad tracks already replaced with the image of him stumping peevishly down a cobblestoned hill, a thin, frail old man following in his wake like an expectant schoolboy.

Milan's shadow turns out to be Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), who offers him a room for the night; the only hotel in town is closed. ("Tourists are scarce in November," Manesquier deadpans, "as they are in June.") Though Manesquier proclaims himself a man of austere style, his house is packed with rococo clutter, all that remains of his long-dead mother. As they enter, Milan remarks with amazement tinged with vague distaste that Manesquier locks neither the gate nor the door to his house. Manesquier has, it seems, lost the keys to both. Not to worry, he says: "I have spares."

Even so early in the film, the stage is set for a fairly odious, touchy-feely affair, full of sharing, and learning, and men with gruff exteriors who melt into teary little puddles. Leconte knows that an audience can see the outlines of such a story looming on the horizon like a soppy tsunami, and The Man on the Train works overtime to convince us that it has nothing so reductive in mind, all the while surreptitiously stoking our desires for just that. By the time the movie finally gets around to giving us what it's all but promised it wouldn't, we're almost relieved.

While Leconte has nothing so self-conscious in mind as a buddy movie that comments on buddy movies, the casting of lead actors as iconic as Hallyday and Rochefort is surely no accident. Hallyday, often referred to as "the French Elvis" (and almost as often derisively), has been a star in France since the 1960s; when Manesquier steals into his guest's room and surreptitiously tries on his leather jacket, he's living out the fantasies of generations of air-guitar-strumming French youngsters. And when Manesquier, after slipping on that jacket, draws imaginary six-guns from invisible holsters and drawls, "Earp -- Wyatt Earp," you see the far-off glint that led Terry Gilliam to choose Rochefort as his Don Quixote.

Leconte knows that part of the joy of The Man on the Train is watching these old hands square off against each other, and what's more, he knows we know it, but rather than turn his two personalities into caricatures of themselves (as I can only imagine, and dread, The In-Laws does), Leconte lets us see beyond their façades. Even though Milan turns out to have come to town for criminal purposes, he's not the outlaw he appears; the photograph drawn from his jacket pocket, which looks to have been taken in the American West, turns out to be from a fun fair where he worked as a stunt man. And for all his defeated self-loathing, the self-proclaimed "silent onlooker" Manesquier has enviable qualities of his own, though having Milan grab him by the lapels and shout, "Don't you see how extraordinary you are?" may not be the best way to reveal them.

Shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou in a faded palette that at times verges on the colors of video, The Man on the Train is like a wisp of smoke, an aroma barely scented. Just frequently enough so the point is made, but not so frequently it becomes a gimmick, the characters enter or leave a scene by simply dissolving into or out of place, like spirits conjured up for the space of the story, then returned to the ether. The film's conclusion takes on similarly metaphorical airs; it's too baroque and stylized to jibe with the languorous naturalism that's gone before. I can't decide if it's a false note, though, or just a dissonant coda, but it's the attempt to literalize what's already become clear through implication that makes it seem so unnecessary. It wouldn't ring so false if the rest of the movie didn't ring so true.

The Man on the Train

Directed by Patrice Leconte A Paramount Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz 5

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