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Patrice Leconte's The Man On the Train sounds like a cliché-riddled mess. Two polar opposites meet and envy each other's lifestyles - it's been done before. If Train were an American film, one of the characters would probably have accidentally stumbled upon and invoked some ancient incantation that would, after appearing to do nothing, eventually occasion some sort of spirit swap. And in that American film, the two characters would probably be played by Oscar winners Tommy Lee Jones and Cuba Gooding, Jr.
Luckily, Train, like Leconte, hails from France (a country that used to be amusing to mock, but that's, like, so five minutes ago). Instead of Gooding, we get the plastic surgery-loving rocker Johnny Hallyday as Milan, a character we meet as he takes a train to a tiny provincial town. Milan, who is the titular man on the titular train, is to meet three other men in this town, where they have planned to knock over a bank. When he arrives at his destination, Milan discovers the town's only hotel is closed for the season, which ratchets up his tension headache another couple of degrees.
While at the pharmacy in search of something to ease the pain, Milan runs into Manesquier (Lost In La Mancha's Jean Rochefort stepping in for T.J. Jones), a retired poetry teacher who has lived alone since his mother died some years back. Yes, Manesquier's home is quite large; and no, he wouldn't mind at all if Milan crashes there for a couple of days. The two men retreat to Manesquier's mansion, which appears to be on the verge of falling apart after years of zero upkeep (it's not quite as bad as in Willard, though).
So here we have the scruffy, leather-jacketed Milan, looking every bit like a lifetime criminal, and the doddering Manesquier, who could be a Donald Sutherland clone but with slippers and a pipe. One is a risk-taker who wishes he could just sit around a big, empty house and chill out for a while. The other sits around a big, empty house and chills out, but really craves more excitement. The cinematic yin-yang relationship is completed by each of the characters going through potentially life-changing events in the coming days - the bank job for Milan, and triple bypass surgery for Manesquier.
Leconte (The Widow of Saint-Pierre, The Girl On the Bridge) manages to stretch this very simple story into a very watchable film (the men bond over a jigsaw puzzle, for chrissake) and adds one more notch to a very eclectic filmography that makes him somewhat of a French John Sayles. The story was penned by 70-year-old novelist Claude Klotz, who has written original screenplays for Leconte before (Felix and Lola and The Hairdresser's Husband), but probably didn't call for the nifty idea of each character having their own score (Milan's is cool guitar, and Manesquier's is classical piano stuff), which slowly blend into one another. Accolades (Best Film and Rochefort for Best Actor at the Venice Fest) are very deserving. Give the French a break, you cretins.
1:30 - R for some language and brief violence
========== X-RAMR-ID: 34934 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1134854 X-RT-TitleID: 1122069 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 8/10
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