fighting for love
by
Douglas Messerli
Danièle Thompson, Patrice Chéreau, and Pierre Trividic (screenplay) Patrice Chéreau (director)Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) / 1998
Imagine joining Mike Newell’s film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) only for the funeral of Gareth (Simon Callow); and instead of Matthew, Gareth’s long- time lover Matthew (John Hannah)—the two representing the only gay couple in this hetero-normative celebration of marriage the two having been in a kind of marriage the others in Gareth’s intellectual clique could not recognize—delivering a beautiful eulogy by reading another “splendid bugger” W. H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues,” he were to deliver a short and bitter diatribe against his elderly lover. Or—if you haven’t seen that movie in which once again more demands that the gay charismatic figure must die so that the heterosexual others may celebrate their normative couplings—what if you were to attend a showing of Sidney Lumet’s stylish 1974 retelling of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express—featuring nearly every available British and Hollywood star of the day: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, and Wendy Hiller—set in a far less grand and crowded 2nd class train without the help of Hercule Poirot to untangle their relationships, some of them seemingly queer, and their connection with the murdered man Lanfranco Cassetti, alias Edward Ratchett onboard.
Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 work Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (Those Who
Love Me Can Take the Train) puts it audiences in much the same position
as I’ve just suggested, and takes it one step further by peppering his group of
acolytes surrounding the painter/sculptor Jean-Baptiste Emmerich with just a
few women (one elderly self-declared lover of Jean-Baptiste, Lucie, and the
wives of some of the artist’s close male friends) among a group of gay and
bisexual men, lovers of Jean-Baptiste or one another all endlessly milling
about in the crowded train from Paris to Limoges where the pedagogue has
determined to be buried—one of the largest cemeteries in the world. The
Jean-Baptise character and the film’s title were said to have been based on the
documentary film-maker François Reichenbach, some of whose films I’ve reviewed
in these volumes.
One of the great joys—and frustrations—of
the film is the requirement to piece together the soap-opera-like interconnections
of the various characters we encounter on this mad train ride where
cinematographer Eric Gautier’s hand-held camera weaves in and out of the train seat-
and aisle- conversations while a child, Elodie (Delphine Schiltz) behaves
almost as badly as Zazie in Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro (1960) as
she steals candy, grabs photos central characters are studying, and basically
attempts to create general havoc throughout. It is she, we later discover, who
may inherit the dead man’s estate.
The train sequences were filmed over a
fourteen day period in two carriages attached to regularly running trains
between Paris and Mulhouse. It’s estimated that the cast and crew traveled 12,000 kilometers during two
weeks in filming these early scenes. As Sight & Sound commentator Chris
Darke wrote, “...The journey to Limoges is a triumph both of exposition and
choreography.....Éric Gautier's use of handheld 'Scope cinematography gives the
feeling of both buffeting movement and swooping detail." And, I might add,
it helps to confuse our attempts to piece out just who is who, who they love,
and, just as importantly, who they once loved or want to.
As I mention, this is much of the fun of
the first half of Chereau’s film, and if you desire that pleasure you should
perhaps put off reading the rest of this essay until you have seen the film for
yourself. But I do think that it is important to outline the interconnections I
was able to unravel—
Let us just begin by restating what by
the end of the film is easily discernible: the painter Jean-Baptiste, who has a
twin brother Lucien (both played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) has not only served
as a blusteringly ingratiating guru for most of the males in this film, but has
shared his bed with them. He has also
apparently had a loving relationship with Lucien’s wife, who in reaction to
Lucien’s revenge of silence, eventually kills herself, having remained in their
relationship only for the sake of their son Jean-Marie (Charles Berling), who
out of bitterness for his father also became an acolyte of, and perhaps was
also buggered by, his uncle. The family fortune, overseen by Lucien, was
apparently obtained through the production of shoes (rooms of their home are still
filled with them), which, along with porcelain, is one of the two major
industries of Limoges. Late in his life Jean-Louis evidently also had an affair
with Lucie (Marie Daëms), who, having kept in regular contact with the artist, describes
herself his “impossible woman”—an epithet to which another member of the group responds
is perfect for the “impossible man”— evidently has made the travel arrangements
for this group outing, and is the only one who actually seems to be grieving
Jean-Baptiste’s death.
In the early scenes, we observe François (Pascal Greggory, Chéreau’s longtime lover) looking
over slides and scrapbooks of the artist’s work, in seeming preparation for a
eulogy he never delivers, the fact for which Lucie later criticizes him. He is
later described by others as Jean-Baptiste’s “favorite,” and has been working
for years on a book on the painter without evidently finishing it. Indeed, one
of the subplots of this movie is how all of Jean-Baptiste’s friends and lovers,
although sustained by him, broke with him due to the artist’s abuse, his
fickleness, or insatiable demands.
François’s
lover of the past few years, whom another of the group members, Bernard (Olivier
Gourmet) gauchely refers to as François’ fiancée, is Louis (Bruno Todeschini),
a beautiful man who seems to be attending the funeral simply as François’s friend,
but who apparently has also come to know Jean-Baptiste through their mutual
visits. We never know if he might have been one of the original disciples or
whether François met him through
the artist. But, oddly enough, it is Louis who becomes one of the major figures
by film’s end.
Before I describe the complexity of Louis’
character, however, I should finish Bernard off, since he is later
characterized by Jean-Baptiste himself as an “a loser and an ass-kisser,” who
when he is mocked by the others, presumes it is because his wife Lorette is mad.
If nothing else, he actually has written a small book about the author. But in
his sudden recognition that he being laughed at for his own behavior, not his
wife’s, he is so hurt he abruptly leaves the wake—which we might better
describe as an “awakening” for the guests. But enough about this hanger-on.
On his way to the train itself, he again
spots the boy, and when Lucie becomes terrified at having lost one of their
members, Louis quickly volunteers to go back in search of her, obviously to seek
out the mysterious boy once again.
In fact, he does reencounter him, this time on the train itself. After sitting for a while with François he rises to seek out the boy, discovering him in a train aisle, where he tells him a strange story that seems almost stolen from Alain Resnais’ L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961)—the many film associations I make throughout are obviously not unintentional. As the two furtively embrace and kiss, he tells Bruno, whose name he is now told, that he has seen him once before, three years earlier at the same station, Gare d'Austerlitz, almost to the same day. It’s possible, the boy responds, since he often travels from Paris to his home in the south of France. Louis suggests they go for a coffee, or jokingly asks, “or should we retire the men’s bathroom for a quickie.” Actually they eventually choose the latter, kissing, embracing, and Bruno pulling down his pants, but allowing Louis only to stroke his ass without actually having sex.
This brief encounter clearly effects
Louis, and when he returns to his seat next to François
he tells him “I love you.” His lover responds, “We’ve been together too long
for such declarations.” And when Louis asks if he still agrees with their
original commitment to being completely honest with each other, François hands
him a handkerchief which, he jokes, his mother sends him in large quantities. “She
thinks I’m too sensitive. Everyone knows I’m not.” He pauses before delivering
the zinger, “So don’t use kid gloves. I’m listening.”
Louis
goes on to describe the boy, admitting that “I love him.”
“Has it been going on long?”
“No, just since the station. I’ve known him
for ages. But we never met or spoke.”
“Are you kidding?”
“It’s sudden, I’m crushed.”
If this appears to be a slightly surreal conversation, it almost immediately turns even stranger as François inquires:
Did he tell you he was HIV positive?
[Pause] Bruno.
Because he didn’t tell me. He told me long after.
Shocked
by his lover’s intense knowledge of the boy, he also discovers that he didn’t
find out until six months later.
“Then it wasn’t a fling? It was a real
affair.”
“Since about a year. Didn’t Jean-Baptiste
tell you?”
Louis turns toward François, rising to say,
“You’re a scumbag.”
During their conversation, the train has
made an unscheduled stop at La Souterrane, and Louis gets off and enters the
station, Bruno soon joining him. When the train is finally ready to move on,
Louis does not reboard, while Bruno does, making it apparent that the boy is
still in some sort of relationship with François. As the elder later asks the
boy: “Was I such a bastard because I left, or because I stayed.”
Previously, we have seen Claire (Valeria
Bruni Tedeschi) in the bathroom taking a pill and stuffing several boxes of
pills into her coat pockets. When she enters the main car to speak to her
husband, Jean-Marie (Lucien’s son if you recall) will not even speak to her. We
soon learn that because of her drug addiction the two are breaking up, and she
has refused to even answer his letters with regard to property rights and other
matters. The two rightfully are furious with each other with seemingly no means
of reconciliation.
What Jean-Marie doesn’t know is that
apparently Claire has given up drugs, and the pill she has just popped, and the
others stuffed inside her coat are to help relieve her body from the
complications of her being pregnant. She is afraid that if she were to tell him,
he would even doubt that it was his child. Throughout the rest of the voyage the
two glower and snip at one another, and because of their broken relationship
Jean-Marie has grown so bitter that he delivers the spiteful eulogy of which I’ll
soon report. Certainly, there seems to be no hope for their reunion,
particularly since Jean-Baptiste has long warned his pupil about the dangers of
a woman like Claire, obviously resenting that his nephew has chosen to marry a
woman.
Also on board is that obnoxiously charming
girl and her mother Catherine (Dominique Blanc). We only discover their reason
for traveling with the others as they all see, out the window, Elodie’s father Thierry
(Roschdy Zem) speeding by in a station wagon carrying the coffin of
Jean-Baptiste to take the body from Paris to his designated burial plot in
Limoges. Thierry is clearly another of Jean-Baptiste’s many male lovers, but
not through his tutelage, but rather through meeting the artist after he had a
serious heart attack and was hospitalized in the institution where Thierry worked
as night nurse. When the frail man finally was released Thierry, as he
describes it, carried the body home in his arms and nursed him to health,
obviously developing a relationship to him so close that Jean-Baptiste eventually
came to describe Thierry and Catherine’s daughter Elodie as his granddaughter,
and accordingly, bequeathed her his part of the Emmerich estate.
Thierry, as we gradually begin to discover, is a kind of wild man who
picks up a hitchhiker—who understandably is a bit wary of riding in a car with
a corpse in the backseat—tossing him out of the car when the driver discovers
that he has to take a detour. Later, Thierry, who
since it is later intimated provides drugs to Jean-Marie may himself be on
drugs, spins off the road steering the car to a rest in the middle of a wheatfield.
The car eventually arrives in Limoges via a tow truck.
As we slowly untangle their relationships over
the first frenetic hour of this film, we realize, as Lisa Nesselson
observes in Variety, “There’s not a happy camper in the bunch.” This
ensemble, she asserts, “makes the average Woody Allen film seem like a picnic
for the well-adjusted.”
The first thing Jean-Marie does upon the
group’s arrival in Limoges is visit the impossibly gargantuan cemetery in order
to visit his mother’s grave, the only woman we feel that he was ever truly able
to completely love. There he encounters his father who admits his own faults,
particularly his ineffectual attempts to offer his wife something that might
take the place of Jean-Baptiste’s attentions. Lucien is now even afraid in
facing the group of mourners, that they might blame him for his wife’s suicide,
as Jean-Marie has already made clear to others, he does. Yet here, actually
confronting the man he has hated for so many years, Jean-Marie assures him that
his mother was a manic-depressive and that everyone know that fact.
Yet only an hour or two later, Jean-Marie, speaking to the small band of would-be grievers blames all of them, including himself, for letting down Jean-Baptiste, for not living up to his expectations. Obviously still furious with his own failed marriage and stung by the artist’s condemnation of it, he virulently expresses viewpoints that we know and further discover to be completely false:
He [Jean-Baptiste] wouldn’t have wanted to
be a
father. I wonder whether anyone wants to be
a father.
He didn’t want any children.
The battle ground is set up for a violent
encounter between the two sexually confused married bi-sexual men, both bitter
for their own failed marriages, and also both now fighting for the right to
inherit what Jean-Baptiste has left them—although it is really in Lucien’s
hands who has told Catherine that he does not intend to contest his brother’s
will. In the midst of the battle Thierry slugs his wife as she attempts to
intervene, upon which she warns him that if he ever strikes her again she will
take her daughter and leave him. Jean-Marie, having attacked nearly everyone in
sight, goes running off for rest of the night.
Viviane seems the most rational being
still standing, and as Lucien—hearing that she is a “shoe freak”—offers her a
pair of new shoes from the enormous stock that still remains in his house, the
Having made his way to Limoges, Louis has
been trying to telephone, and finally reaching the house talks to François with Bruno listening in on another phone. He restates
his intense love for Bruno and attempts to convince his lover that since they both
love him they should take him under their care as a kind of son. François scoffs at the idea, and when Louis repeats
that he cannot live without him, the self-declared “insensitive” man queries
Louis if he truly believes he will be able to care for Bruno as the inevitable
begins to happen. But Louis is implacable and is certain, if nothing else, about
his love die Bruno.
Unpredictably, François, the man who as Nesselson
posited is the “one serene presence...whose cynical acceptance of every
possible chamber in affairs of the heart allows him to glide above the fray,” at
film’s end is only one left without someone else. As he witnesses from the taxi
Louis and Bruno hugging in the hotel window, sees Claire and Jean-Marie walking
together along the street, and watches Thierry, Catherine, and their daughter
driving off, the art historian returns to Paris almost as a villain, a man who because
he has been unwilling to fight for love, to shed tears into those dozens of
handkerchiefs he is sent by his mother, will have no one but himself to blame
for his lonely nights ahead.
Patrice Chéreau
died in Paris on October 7, 2013 from lung cancer at 68 years of age. He was
not buried in Limoges, but in the great Paris cemetery Père Lachaise. The film
above was not much appreciated by US viewers, despite the fact that it won the
Best Director and Best Actor César Awards. I loved the film so much that
although I wrote the piece above based on a DVD viewing from Netflix, I also
ordered my own copy so that I might watch it over a regular intervals for the remainder
of my life.
Los Angeles, March 28, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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