Train of Life (Train de vie)

At first, "Train of Life" would appear to be France's entry into the burgeoning genre of Holocaust comedies. (Everyone who thought two years ago there would be a burgeoning genre of Holocaust comedies, raise your hand.) While this film does have its share of laughs, it aims not so much to be a comedy as a fable, a fantasy about how the Holocaust would have ended in a more beautiful world. Whatever the value of this intention (and many objections could be made to it), the result is a mess. The film cannot decide if it truly believes the Holocaust is happening around it, and so its tone ricochets wildly and ineffectively. The events that take place in it strain credulity as much as any action film ever has. And the ending, which attempts to redeems what has come before, is too little, too late.

So what's to like? At its best moments, this film explores issues of identity with both comedic vigor and tenderness. In the film, the village idiot of a French shtetl becomes aware of the advancing German exterminators, and decides that the way to avoid their fate is to buy a train, outfit it to German specifications, have some villagers pretend to be German officers, and pretend that the train is the village's deportation train. With this cover, he hopes to get the train to Russia and then Palestine. Although this plan is so crazy that not even Arnold Schwartzenegger (or Ben Stiller) would have anything to do with it, the village elders waste not two seconds in adopting the plan and mobilizing the entire village to carry it out. They escape the village in time, pass by German checkpoints, evade French Resistance saboteurs, survive a Communist uprising and practice various improbable deceptions during the journey.

The strongest parts by far deal with the issues faced by the villagers who must attempt to pass for German soldiers. An actor named Rufus, playing the villager who is charged with being the acting German marshal (and who is promoted in midfilm to field marshal by a change in costume), effectively throws himself into both the humor and the sadness of his situation, a battle-tested hero of the community who is sickening to look at for those who value him. Since this is a French comedy, some jokes do indeed deliver the (isolated) big-time laughs. And it is stirring, in a way, to see the villagers evade and bluff their way along the train tracks.

But for a comedy to be truly funny and satisfying, it has to refer in some way to a world we can recognize as real. "Train of Life"'s historical context is as real as anything, but the world this film is set in is not the real world. In this world, a small village can be instantly united behind a ridiculous plan, said small village can somehow summon the considerable resources to undertake the plan, the villagers are aided by the fact that all Nazis are idiots and buffoons, a train that exists on no one's timetables is only stopped twice on its entire journey, and there's time while fleeing a ruthless and deadly predator of an army to stop for partying and lovemaking. The world this movie inhabits, in short, feels untrue and cheaply optimistic. The times something semi-realistic happens, such as the abuse of the tailor who is temporarily a POW of the real Nazis, only highlight the shallow gaiety of the rest of the film.

Finally, "Train of Life" has an ending which is at once surprising and inevitable, which tries to make everything that came before it beautiful and true and valuable. But it is thirty seconds against ninety minutes, and though it goes a long way towards its intended expiation of the movie's sins, it cannot balance out the accumulated weight of unreality that preceded it. Thus we end up with a film which is not suspenseful when it is supposed to create tension, which is barely funny when it goes for the laughs, and which ultimately inspires more curiosity than anything else. The Holocaust comedy may or may not be a viable genre. But "Train of Life," for all its incidental strengths, is definitely not a viable movie.

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