The National Film Theatre in London is currently running a season of so-called lost films shown at the London Film Festival over the last fifty years, favorably received at the time, and then disappearing into obscurity. Since most of the films featured are not available on either video or DVD, this seemed a good opportunity to broaden my horizons.
The first of the two films I selected, Trans-Europ Express, proved a huge disappointment. Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet of Last Year in Marienbad fame, it was, in a word, pretentious and worse yet, not very good. The director himself played a director journeying on a train with two colleagues and testing ideas for a would-be scenario of a smuggler on the Paris-Antwerp run; these, in turn, were acted by Jean-Louis Trintignant who seemed nearly as lost as the audience. I suppose this was some sort of conceit of the director's power over his actors, but I have seen the same concept more successfully deployed elsewhere.
I was therefore not looking forward to the other train film I had chosen, although it had sounded promising. Dating from 1968, it was directed by Belgian Andre Delvaux and proved to be rather a mixed bag. It started slowly and somewhat boringly as we are introduced to Mathias, a linguistics professor (played by Yves Montand) in the heart of Flemish-speaking Belgium. He is in a loving relationship with handsome Frenchwoman Anne (Anouk Aimee), but she feels something of an outsider in his parochial world, especially as he avoids formalizing their relationship.
After a meal, which he has carefully prepared for her, where he savors each oyster and each sip of wine, he needs to leave for an evening lecture at another university. On the way to the station they quarrel and she storms off; he is therefore pleasantly surprised when she joins him on his journey, even though he had discouraged this. So far, relatively straightforward, if a little puzzling — especially as we are provided with flashbacks of a previous trip to England, which has little relevance to the plot, except to again present her as a stranger in his world, since she speaks no English.
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