Patrice Leconte's Man on the Train: Unexpect the Expected

In Patrice Leconte's Man on the Train (L'Homme du train), Milan (Johnny Hallyday), a grim, late-middle-aged criminal with a migraine, gets off the train in a sleepy French provincial town and buys aspirin from a pharmacist who inadvertently gives him water-soluble tablets. Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), a chatty retired teacher of literature who is also in the pharmacy, takes him to his estate, the outer gate and house door to which he leaves unlocked, for a glass of water. Manesquier invites him to stay, but the taciturn Milan shies away from his talkative host. When he gets to the town's hotel and finds it closed, however, he goes back, through the open gate and door, where Manesquier expects him. The movie's style is slightly edgy and it withholds information, so at first you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop: for Manesquier to make a pass at Milan, or for Milan to discover a pile of corpses in the basement, or something. And you know it's not just your acculturation to Hollywood product, because the movie has Manesquier establish his heterosexuality out of the blue by pointing out a 19th-century painting of a female nude and telling Milan that as a boy he used to beat off looking at it.

The movie is highly aware of the audience. Yes, it's talky in a way that is unusual in American movies, but the script by Claude Klotz is an assertive little entertainment in its own way. Manesquier talks and talks and what comes out isn't meant to create a plausible character so much as to please the audience directly. He ruminates on the active life like Milan's that he hasn't led and about advancing age; he discusses poetry and painting and music; he disparages his famous ancestor; he gets cranky about little things, a clerk in a pâtisserie, for instance, and his guests' comments about the infinite when sitting on his terrace at night; and we're meant to find it all "original." He's loquacious in part because he's lonely and in part because he's about to undergo triple bypass surgery, but he's also meant to be "wise." The movies plays it smart by making him cranky--it's a lot easier to take than if he were making high-flown pronouncements about art and life and the infinite, like an animated commonplace book (e.g., Chaplin in Limelight (1952)).

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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