A group of mourners travels by train to bury a recently deceased artist in Limoges. As they journey, secrets and desires unfold, with relationships shifting, past loves resurfacing, and personal connections revealed. At the funeral and afterward, tensions rise among the group, leading to further emotional complexities at the artist’s family home.
Jean-Louis Trintignant Valeria Bruni Tedeschi Charles Berling Pascal Greggory Bruno Todeschini Sylvain Jacques Vincent Perez Roschdy Zem Dominique Blanc Marie Daëms Nathan Kogen Delphine Schiltz Chantal Neuwirth Thierry de Peretti Olivier Gourmet Geneviève Brunet Didier Brice Guillaume Canet Nicolas Maury
Dominique Castan Eric Chemel Sylvie Espinasse Vincent Grand d'Esnon Emmanuel Lavrut Joël Lavrut Victor Leitao Raph Salis Gilles Tissot Gilles Viaud
Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, Wer mich liebt, nimmt den Zug, Los que me quieren cogerán el tren, Kdo mne má rád, pojede vlakem, 나를 사랑하는 사람들은 기차를 타시오, 爱我就搭火车, Те, кто меня любит, поедут поездом
FranceU
France
Frustratingly, the trans character is treated like one of many family scandals, a dirty secret to be revealed. She is treated briefly as a punchline and played by a cis man (as far as I can tell). There's also a scene where it seems like the film is using the old trans-women-clothing-fetish cliche. It also seems to shame someone with HIV, though this is a bit murkier a portrayal--it is a little more sympathetic than it seems at first, but still problematic.
This is especially frustrating because the portrayal is otherwise somewhat sympathetic, and the journey on the train that composes the first part of the film is an interesting, tightly written stream of characterizations (including that of the dead body). It also makes good use of the massive graveyard setting and the sprawling house, letting all three settings define the atmospheres of the scenes taking place in each. It's severely marred by its patriarchal laziness.
Family, friends and lovers of an artist gather in the French town of Limonges to attend his funeral, an event that causes the conflicts between them to come to the surface and intensify. Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train is a tense and visceral drama about people slowly revealing existential angst, a portrait of personal relationships and contemporary life at the turn of the last century. Patrice Chéreau has crafted an ambitious piece with a good first act and fantastic work from the cast, but it becomes a little excessive towards the second half and fails to fully delve into the essential themes and psyche of its characters.
Bodies and movement, a historical trajectory through acummulation of gestures. Organized by Chereau as sort of musical without singing, just people playing through waves of emotion. Not all of this works (the trans character played by Perez in particular), but as a large taking into account of Chereau's generation and an attempt to find a symphonic emotional texture out of it this is always impressive and the quality of the large ensemble action remarkable throughout.
By all accounts, a rare ensemble piece in Chéreau's oeuvre which exhilarating captures the internal crises and chaos of its characters. Visually kinetic and dramatically volatile, the film centers around a group of friends and more who come together after the death of an eccentric, charismatic painter they all once admired. Great cast, terrific music, and a strong and powerful story.
As a camera whirled about a subway station, crashing into its subjects–time against space uncontrollable–the sound of Tracy Thorn singing "Better Things" contra uncorrelated voiceover destroyed me, and I turned it off as quickly as it came on. You're so beautiful, it hurts to look at you, I thought, like Angela Chase.
But day destroys night, night divides the day, and finally, years later, I watched this, the prickly twin to Guiguet's Les passagers, all the way through to the end—end of a life, a film, an era, and a public health crisis like no other.
Of all the films I loved and shut off, this was the most beautiful.
Messy French people being horrible to each other makes for a challenging family drama. Ultimately more interesting than entertaining due to the array of disorienting techniques that director Patrice Chéreau uses, including the simultaneous introduction of multiple characters, densely layered sound and music, close-in camerawork, staccato editing, and minimal exposition. The downside here is that conveying emotion takes a backseat to technique. I don’t doubt that the characters feel things strongly, but more context would help the viewer get there too. The near-continuous soundtrack would be more annoying if it didn’t feature everyone from Nina Simone to Björk.
Patrice Chéreau
🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈Stories of Gay/Bi Men (Features) 🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈
quelques scènes stylees, le début notamment et intéressant de tourner dans un train ça donne un dynamisme et une tension au film
dès qu'on en sort c prodigieusement ennuyeux au point que je croyais qu'au bout d'une heure le film était fini. Il aurait dû en rester la.
On comprend rien du début jusqu'à la fin, trop de personnages, des relations inhabituelles entre eux et qui ne sont pas explicitees. Ya deux personnes dont on ne connait tjrs pas le lien avec JB a la fin du film. Comme des ministres d'un gouvernement Barnier.
De nvlles personnes sont ajoutées ttes les deux minutes et chacun a son drame sur lequel on passe cinq minutes ce qui fait que ça passe du coq à l'âne sans cesse et me fait hésiter entre Charybde et Sylla pour qualifier ma soirée.
Some things which particularly moved me:
1. A group of mourners on their way to a funeral aboard a train, who are suddenly awakened by the child among their number to the fact that the coffin containing the body of the man they’re going to bury is being visibly bourne alongside the train by a car on the highway. Epiphanic.
2. A love scene in the same train’s bathroom compartment between two men which is so ambivalent and vulnerable in its decipiction of homosexuality that it momentarily attains to a universal tenderness which transcends mere Eros. The two lovers being unable to really have intercourse at first, and just collapsing into each other’s arms to cry and be mutually consoled,…
Je réitère ma théorie sur les peintres…
C’est un peu un Desplechin mais version lgbt
The primal appeal of The Big Chill given operatic, cinematic largesse through unencumbered Cinemascope as art-hounds-on-the-brink descend upon Limoges for their maestro's funeral, where hetero-couplings get tested, transgender identity confounds then conveys universal longings, and the proposal to live life imaginatively in the age of AIDS for a gay-male love triangle-each actor like marble chiseled by light-climaxes in one of the top 5 most awesome movie endings-an angel's eye view that breaks boundaries and defeats death (R.I.P. Patrice Chereau, whose Those Love Me Can Take the Train (1999), Son frere (2004), and Queen Margot (1994) are the most "me" of movies)
-- --- ---
In the last year, the world lost two of my favorite filmmakers (Patrice Chereau and Alain Resnais)…
An effective reminder of why I never get romantically involved with French people or "artistes"
