Diagonaldi Very well executed

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

pointyfilippa The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

johnnyboyz Patrice Chéreau's film "Those Who Love me Can Take the Train" will not be for everyone, a film one cannot help but describe as "an acquired taste", even if such a statement is often branded out with too much regularity. Even then, going with it will not necessarily equate to having loved it. The film, a piece about life that happens to have that of a dead body at its core, enjoys amassing characters and gathering them into the restricting, confined space of a train carriage; enjoys depicting them speak to one another; has fun tackling homosexuality and even finds time to deal with interracial falling outs within wider circles of families still. One of its final shots, a full frontal composition of a nude transvestite getting into a bath, ought to have been more striking than it was. Is this out of the fact we've spent so much time with these issue-ridden people that we've accepted this person as a human being and do not jolt? Or is it out of the fact we forget to react out of being numb through such an intense series of dialogues. Spliced into three very distinct sections, the film is about love; life; death and kinship - a film detailing the coming together of those who are apart of a wider family furthermore related to someone that has recently died. In continuing on after the burial, the film plays its hand and reveals that it was never about the gathering for the service et al. in the first place; moreover, it is a film about an apparently crumbling family and a series of exchanges between very aggressive, often confused, persons doing their best to deal with grief and being stuck with one another under these circumstances. It's here one pays special attention to the title: "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train", a statement seemingly made beyond the grave, a line as if uttered by the deceased in relation to those travelling to his burial at one of Europe's largest cemeteries. This infers that it was never about a family coming to terms with how they felt about the deceased, but in fact with each other: many of them here do indeed 'take' the train – everybody bar one specific individual. Now that the burial's happened, let's see what they all think of each other as the piece enters its final forty minutes.Things are socially awkward at the beginning of the piece, starting out at such a stage before taking a bit of a nosedive anyhow. People meet at a station bound for the city of Limoges, where the said burial will happen for an elderly relative who made his way through life as a painter. Things are chaotic, finding everybody and getting everybody on is a struggle in itself; the train rocks around, nobody has anywhere to go – two young men find solace with each other in the toilet compartment; children are difficult to control and a woman strains to talk about her drug addiction problem. Away from the train, Roschdy Zem's character Thierry shoots down to the cemetery in his estate car, coffin in tow. He's aggressive and we're aware of what chaos he would have brought to the proceedings on board the train. He picks up hitch-hikers that have no relevance to the narrative and later allows his rage to get the better of him en route. We sense Chéreau could be producing better. They have a decent ear for dialogue and they spread the screenplay around a table consisting of either gender; various races, people from different backgrounds and of stark ages. Later on, when the family arrive at this huge graveyard, there is a neat cinematic flourish involving camera and sound working with one another in a way that doesn't happen at any other moment in what is a two hour film. Chéreau feels as if he's reigning things in, playing things down – they seem to be going out of their way to create something more neo-realistic, something that's stripped of mostly all the things synonymous with mainstream film-making (regardless of nation) and more inclined to veer into territory more associated with a brand of cinema people can find frustrating and alienating, even though there is ultimately lots going on on-screen. As stated, the approach to break the film up into distinct chapters consisting of the travelling to the burial; the process of burying said relative and then what essentially materialises as the 'wake', which is the chief point of interest here. For a film with the approach that places so much emphasis on a group of people congregating out of the fact someone in their wider family has died to carry on after the funeral itself, in spite of the triumphant aforementioned flourish once at the place we all sense will be the setting for the finale, is unsubtle at worst. I'm not sure if the film has as much energy as it thinks it does, and there are large sections of play whereby very little neither happens nor is necessarily that important. Where visually, and in terms of bare content, the film does flounder its overall thematic stands it in good stead for the long run. This is a mature film going about a serious subject matter in a fashion that screams for artistic recognition, but one that is far from perfect.

A.W Richmond They all loved him. Jean Louis Trintignat is the focus of their love. He is dead. Love is not. The shape, light and nature of one's love for another changes from character to character. I was riveted by that puzzle that love usually implies. And Vincent Perez? Where is he? I kept waiting for him to appear in all its unbearable beauty. The film was almost over and no sign of Perez. But, I was rapidly falling in love with a young woman I had never seen before on the screen. She is not just a superb actress but a monumental beauty. Hold on a minute. I think I've seen her before. God almighty! It's Vincent Perez! Among the many delightful, thoughtful surprises of this, unusual, french import is Vincent Perez as a girl. If you let the film happen and you don't fight it. You are going to have a wonderful experience.

clive-13 Wow, what was this about? I rented this film with no knowledge of plot, characters, actors, directors, anything. All I knew was it was filmed in France, with English subtitles, was contemporary and had a gay plot or subplot. As I write this it occurs to me that I must have liked it. I love to critique film, yet unless I am moved, emotionally or psychologically, I rarely want to write down why, or how, a film has affected me. This film affected me. ...........................SPOILERS AHEAD........................ Let's start with the basic plot line. A rather minor painter in Paris has passed away and has asked to be buried in his old home town of Limoges in the south of France. 14 of his old friends, relatives, lovers and hanger-ons board a train in Paris early in the morning for a few hours ride to the funeral. The painters body is not on the train but is being driven down in a Pugoet station wagon. They all meet up at the cemetery where a man reads a poem in English and one of the lead male characters translates into French. Men and women standing around the grave cry openly. The majority of the mourners end up at a huge French chateaux for a wake. There, over the next 12 hours or so, everyone engages in a nonstop bitch about sex, money, relationships, marriage, children, love and inheritance, not in that order, but all subjects are covered by everyone by the next morning. Now.....What was this film about? It took viewing through the first hour of this 2 hour film for me to realize that many of the men were gay or bi-sexual and had been lovers of the now dead minor painter. Now I know that Europeans, and particularly the French have always been more accepting of same gender love, but what took me so long to get a handle on what was happening in this film was the way that homosexuality was being portrayed. It was taken as almost natural that most of these guys had been a part of the painters life at one time. Not only natural, but simply "the way it was". There was no censoring "gay" as evil or a perversion. That really did not exist. They had all loved the dead man and they were all grieving for him in some manner. What about the women in this film? Other than some older female relatives and two younger women, most of the characters were men. Is it intimated that these women had been lovers of the painter? This is not clear, however, more unusual is the fact that these women have been either lovers or wives of some of the guys who are mourning for their dead lover, the painter One of the male characters, the one who drove the body down from Paris, is married and his wife and child are on the train to Limoges with everyone else. They go to the funeral and the wake. When her husband is driving the body down to Limoges the guy picks up a hitchhiker and uses him as a sounding board to verbalize his grief over the dead painter. He says something like, " I carried him around, washed his body, worshiped him" Does his wife know of his relationship with the dead guy? Did she approve? What is that all about? There is another character who falls in love with a very cute dark haired guy he meets in the railway station as everyone is boarding the train in Paris. They catch an erotic "squeeze" in the trains toilet. Suddenly you are introduced to a woman who is the older guy's wife? Lover? Old girlfriend? She is very upset. Is she upset over his relationship with the young boy, or is she angry about something else? Yet another male character is gay and he drops his hold on the older guy who loves the young boy. I assume because he wants them to happy together, but without him. To top all this off there are old aunts and, I think, fathers and other people who have something to do with the dead painter, but whose role in all this drama isn't clear. Finally there is the transsexual Viviene. She used to be Frederic, and sill has Fred's equipment, but with boobs as well. Did Frederic have a relationship with the dead painter to? I don't know. Viviene's role in this film is also unclear, yet she seems deliciously happy that no one at the funeral and wake has figured out that she used to Fred. So you see this film is extraordinarily complex. I said it affected me and I was not quibbling about that. I will watch this film again (not tonight!). It stupified me. The negative about this film, from an American point of view, is, of course, the beautiful French language that I don't understand. I know the intricacy and double meaning that the French can put into dialog, and I'm sure the translation into English subtitles butchered some, if not a lot, of the meaning of the interplay between characters. Also, the subtitles themselves were small and in white, not yellow, as they should have been making it very difficult to read and understand. Other reviews have mentioned the darkness of the film. I found that not distracting at all. Many of the sequences in the chateaux are dark to fit the sometimes bizarre and somber storyline. Others were emotionally head on perfect. The crowded, speeding train with claustrophobic atmosphere, carrying all the former lovers and friends, hurtling south across the French country side so they may have a last goodbye. The cemetery, huge, with 180,000 dead souls in the bright sunlight. All filled up to the brim with symbolism and portent. This film is a strange one. Wonderful acting, really top notch all around. The camera work is unique and very stylish. The camera floats along at times, sometimes delivering very long, hypnotic track shots. Sometimes the camera is in a helicopter or plane and the sweeping shots of the city of Limoges and the cemetery are very arresting. Most of the scenes in the rest of the film were shot with a hand held camera and cameras. This gave the film an aura of gritty realism and was not the least distracting. I'd have to say the film is strangely Robert "Altmanish" in texture and characterization. In fact, this film would have been more powerful with a deeper insight into all the characters involvement with the dead painter. Altman would have shot enough for another hour, or longer. It would have been just a little easier to understand all the intense emotions and motivations. But, This was not an Altman film. It was a very unique and off beat art film that I will watch again to see what I missed. Don't buy it, rent it, it makes you think. Isn't that what good drama on film is supposed to do? I liked it and recommend it to anyone who loves different and interesting cinema.

patronus A drama queen's wet dream. It offers up a magnificent, almost epic gloss of the melodrama of at least 14 characters. The problem is that with a Robert Altman-sized cast crammed into 2 hours (Altman would take 3 or more), and screen time distributed more or less democratically, it's hard to get to know the characters--but some are very compelling anyway. The film is narrated and edited ridiculously, as if a novel had been tossed into a blender. Most scenes feel like they're less than a minute long yet are packed with dialogue. You might wonder if the filmmakers are trying to obscure script problems by making routine exposition an unusual chore.However, the film's melodrama is presented in a lushly dark, romantic, Gallic way. There's something heady about the experience. And the film has some extraordinary settings. The cemetery is one of the most stunning locations since Scarlet O'Hara walked through the endless Confederate dead. And the train, crowded and zipping through the French countryside, is metaphoric in an undeniably physical way. Since Americans don't support public transportation, esp. trains, this experience struck me as unique.