24 Dec Night Train to Lisbon (2013)

Authorship

This did not work for me, and I would like to discover and report why.

It is a film adapted from a successful book, in which (another) book is the primary agent. Both the outer and inner books are deeply philosophical, abstracting themes about life that are intrinsically attractive, evoke an enriched life, but do not account for passion, love.

The story is about a Swiss professor who finds himself with this inner book. While his quest in this film was triggered by unrelated curiosity, it slowly morphs into a quest to find the author, then to discover the author’s circumstances/history.

He meets key souls who recount past events depicted in flashbacks. There are complications of the cinematic type that have personal bonds and loves in the context of surrounding, lethal national events. You don’t have to know the complexities of those national events; here they are depicted as a cruel fascist government, and a laudable resistance. But it would be useful for you the viewer to have even a Wikipedia exposure, because the political context is a mirror of the personal one: passions and urges versus philosophical ideals and the competing desire to be pure.

That’s the love story: an idealistic man, falling in love with a passionate woman, running away together. In a scene too quickly for me, she leaves him on understanding that her passions are incompatible with his quite selfish idealism. He shortly dies and until our professor visits, her older self does not know how, thinking her leaving killed him.

This short scene is delivered by the profound Lena Olin, not just a fantastic actress interacting with our Jeremy Irons’ professor, but an icon within the cinematic history of passion within blunt national revolutions.

Even though the film itself fails for me, you should see it for this one scene. Irons is our on-screen detective who at the end must make the choice she was faced with. So the thing is framed for a male viewer, one my age, who choses between passion and purpose. Passion here is deep, full of energy and possibilities, but risks so deep they apparently obliterate any ideals. And the ideals: lovely, floral, impossible and sterile, but in many ways more seductive. Oddly safe in their impossibility.

But of course the story is anchored in the women, the two women: sister and lover, that we meet both in youth and retrospective age. The sister, it turns out was the ghostwriter of the inner book.

All this matters because lucid living souls teeter on this abyss between what might present as love and purpose. Between passion and intellect, fruit and bread. We constantly choose, moment by moment, suspecting that each choice is wrong. This is why these films matter, and it matters when they don’t work because the filmmaker plays it too safe. Even Polanski plays it too safe. Polanski! Who had Depp in the ‘professor’ role and this very jewel of Lena Olin! The incandescent Emmanuelle Seigner as ‘the girl’.

Ones that worked for me, but could be too much work for you because you have to have researched kutachi, cabala and polish notions of sex in Keislowski explored in ‘Inland Empire’ with this same Jeremy Irons…

Greenaway’s two ‘book’ films which I see as a pair from each side of this precipice.

‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ may be the touchstone of this form. All four are on my must watch ‘list of fours’, and which in some small way I touch daily. Or rather they touch me. Other than this fond visit by Olin, this film will not.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB