L'Homme du Trains (2003)
At Max Blooms Cafe Noir
Monday August 22
Downtown Fullerton
Part of the Max Blooms
French Film Festival
Directed by Patrice Leconte
Featuring Isabelle Petit-Jacques, Jean Rochefort,
Johnny Hallyday
Five Scoops of Bosco
How we laughed, how we jeered and catcalled when the news came through a couple of years ago that the British Film Council was helping to bankroll a French film - starring Johnny Hallyday. Couldn't it at least have been Cliff, we groaned? Surely this was going to be a new and humiliating low for the Lottery-funded movie industry.
We couldn't have been more wrong. The resulting film, directed by Patrice Leconte and written by the then 70-year-old veteran Claude Klotz, is a little gem: funny, literate, worldly and yet innocent all at the same time. In an indefinable way, it is very French in the sophistication that aerates its comic whimsy, like the bubbles in champagne.
Hallyday doesn't sing a note. The director has prevailed upon the frazzled old Gallic rocker to remain deadpan as Milan, a mysterious tough-guy riding a train out to the French provinces. He's a loner, an outsider, like the heroes of Leconte's films The Widow of Saint Pierre and The Girl on the Bridge. His coloured hair and careless stubble frame a leonine face, unreadable in its blankness, eyes narrowed into slits, like Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef. The first and last serious emotion that creases this weathered face is agony at a headache. When Milan arrives at his destination, it's not a prairie town with cactus and tumbleweeds but a dull suburban spot; he heads straight for a pharmacy, which by some miracle - in this one-horse town where early closing seems to be the permanent order of the day - is still open when he arrives.
Here Milan has a fateful encounter: the simple yet effective narrative device that drives the film. Having bought his aspirin, Milan realises he has got soluble tablets by mistake and it's too late to get another bottle. So he uneasily allows himself to become dependent on the kindness of a stranger. This is Manesquier, an elderly, genial retired schoolteacher, with whom he has already exchanged a curt nod in the shop; he offers to take him back to his place to get some water.
So an odd-couple comedy begins. Manesquier is played by Jean Rochefort, whose gentle, intelligent and sensitive face is so different from Hallyday's - which seems strip-mined of regular expression. The home to which Manesquier takes his new friend is clearly that of a wealthy man, careless of his surroundings. A handsome country house and grounds, with distinguished pictures and furniture, it has been allowed to go to rack and ruin, and Manesquier reveals with a shrug that this is how his late mother liked the house to be appointed, and he does not feel the desire to redecorate.
Elegant, even stylish in his eccentric and scatterbrained way, Manesquier has charm that disarms the weary Milan, who is persuaded to stay a few nights. When his host discovers handguns in his luggage, he becomes even more infatuated by Milan's real purpose in coming to this little town. And just as he is entranced by Milan's criminal glamour, Milan yearns for the comfortable retirement that Manesquier appears to be enjoying. Milan teaches him how to fire a gun; Manesquier teaches his new friend how to wear slippers.
Rochefort has a face that is exactly right for his childlike excitement at the arrival of a real-life desperado. The last time we saw him was his rather pathetic appearance in the documentary about Terry Gilliam's doomed Don Quixote adaptation. Rochefort was cast to play the lead, but his illness scuppered the picture. It was almost unbearable to watch him there, an old man in constant, physical agony. But this movie shows the real Jean Rochefort: sprightly, even puckish. A few weeks ago, I saw him take a bow at the opening gala in London of the Renault French film tour. For a joke, he approached the stage in a slow bent-backed shuffle, while the concerned audience stirred uneasily - and then jumped up with an impish grin.
He is on the same kind of boyish form here. Manesquier reveals to Milan that his first sexual experiences were masturbating in front of a (pretty decorous) 18th-century nude painting. Later, he confesses the fiasco of his sexual advances to girls in cinemas. Always with Rochefort, what you see under the old man's face is not the middle-aged man or the man in his prime, but the untried youth. But Milan is to be Manesquier's final student; he teaches him how to come to terms with disappointment in the evening of one's life.
As it happens, Manesquier has an intense relationship with women. His sister, played by Edith Scob, is married to a boor whom he has always loathed and suspects she has come to loathe also. And he has a mistress, Viviane (Isabelle Petit-Jacques) in whose teenage son he dutifully takes an interest - polite gestures that are brutally dismissed by the cynical Milan.
An emotional relationship between two heterosexual men is such a difficult and unusual thing to dramatise - but Leconte brings it off with delicacy and persuasive charm. It's a feather in the cap of the Film Council. Why can't British films look this classy? The nearest homegrown product I can compare it to is Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter's The Lawless Heart. Perhaps we could aspire to higher-IQ movies like this more often.
Reviewed by Peter Bradshaw
Mr Bradshaw reviews films for the Guardian
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