Un soir, un train (1968)
(One Night... a Train)
Country: FR/BEL
Technical: col 86m
Director: André Delvaux
Cast: Yves Montand, Anouk Aimée, Michael Gough
Synopsis:
A Walloon professor of philology finds the time he has before taking a train to a symposium in Amsterdam extended by a strike of separatist Flemish students. He uses the interval to look up his wife, who is art director on a play by a Flemish playwright he has himself helped to translate, but with whose religious stance on death he fundamentally disagrees. After a dinner 'à deux' in their apartment of oysters and aged burgundy, they quarrel and she runs away, only to turn up on the train he has meanwhile taken, which has been reassigned to another line...
Review:
Delvaux's remarkably short second feature continues to inhabit a world of mystery and allusion. From the opening scene, in which Montand is given an apple to pass on to his sister by a moribund servant of the family, it is full of clues and potential meanings: the political situation, the play, the flashbacks to the lovers' earlier lives, the two characters that join Montand once off the train (a fellow teacher and former student), the extraordinary landscape that provides sustenance, like the village in which no language is spoken and which could be purgatory. And then there is the twist ending, which poses as many questions as it answers, and the flashbacks to England in which Gough provides them with a guided visit to Rotherhithe! Strangely, it stops short of being one of those irritatingly obscure pieces from Mitteleuropa, perhaps because it is pacy, attractively shot and has the texture of a dream.
(One Night... a Train)
Country: FR/BEL
Technical: col 86m
Director: André Delvaux
Cast: Yves Montand, Anouk Aimée, Michael Gough
Synopsis:
A Walloon professor of philology finds the time he has before taking a train to a symposium in Amsterdam extended by a strike of separatist Flemish students. He uses the interval to look up his wife, who is art director on a play by a Flemish playwright he has himself helped to translate, but with whose religious stance on death he fundamentally disagrees. After a dinner 'à deux' in their apartment of oysters and aged burgundy, they quarrel and she runs away, only to turn up on the train he has meanwhile taken, which has been reassigned to another line...
Review:
Delvaux's remarkably short second feature continues to inhabit a world of mystery and allusion. From the opening scene, in which Montand is given an apple to pass on to his sister by a moribund servant of the family, it is full of clues and potential meanings: the political situation, the play, the flashbacks to the lovers' earlier lives, the two characters that join Montand once off the train (a fellow teacher and former student), the extraordinary landscape that provides sustenance, like the village in which no language is spoken and which could be purgatory. And then there is the twist ending, which poses as many questions as it answers, and the flashbacks to England in which Gough provides them with a guided visit to Rotherhithe! Strangely, it stops short of being one of those irritatingly obscure pieces from Mitteleuropa, perhaps because it is pacy, attractively shot and has the texture of a dream.
(One Night... a Train)
Country: FR/BEL
Technical: col 86m
Director: André Delvaux
Cast: Yves Montand, Anouk Aimée, Michael Gough
Synopsis:
A Walloon professor of philology finds the time he has before taking a train to a symposium in Amsterdam extended by a strike of separatist Flemish students. He uses the interval to look up his wife, who is art director on a play by a Flemish playwright he has himself helped to translate, but with whose religious stance on death he fundamentally disagrees. After a dinner 'à deux' in their apartment of oysters and aged burgundy, they quarrel and she runs away, only to turn up on the train he has meanwhile taken, which has been reassigned to another line...
Review:
Delvaux's remarkably short second feature continues to inhabit a world of mystery and allusion. From the opening scene, in which Montand is given an apple to pass on to his sister by a moribund servant of the family, it is full of clues and potential meanings: the political situation, the play, the flashbacks to the lovers' earlier lives, the two characters that join Montand once off the train (a fellow teacher and former student), the extraordinary landscape that provides sustenance, like the village in which no language is spoken and which could be purgatory. And then there is the twist ending, which poses as many questions as it answers, and the flashbacks to England in which Gough provides them with a guided visit to Rotherhithe! Strangely, it stops short of being one of those irritatingly obscure pieces from Mitteleuropa, perhaps because it is pacy, attractively shot and has the texture of a dream.