One stereotype of European films holds that they will tackle challenging intellectual material from absurd angles that, in the long run, render them largely unintelligible to mouth-breathing American audiences. Those Who Love Me Will Take the Train, France's latest gift to American movie theaters, probably won't help
the situation too much.
Those Who Love Me... follows a band of friends, family and lovers as they travel by train from Paris to Limoges to attend the funeral of a painter whose artistic and emotional legacy still looms over their lives. While the concept certainly packs the capacity for an enormous emotional wallop, its characters emerge as a hodgepodge of disparate, fragile archetypes instead of a believable extended family.
It's easy to draw parallels between "Those Who Love Me..." and Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration, another European film that earnestly wrestles with the fallout created when a traumatic event rocks the gathering of an extended family. But where Celebration has a vivid and compelling moral purpose and relatively well-defined relationships between its characters, "Those Who Love Me..." is regrettably tangled and blurry.
While the film has plenty of emotional fuel to burn, its characters frequent outbursts and fits of hysterics seem random at times. To its credit, the material it wrestles with is substantial, and some of director Patrice Chéreau's cinematography (particularly that of the jaw-droppingly enormous necropolis that is the Limoges cemetary) is terrific. In the long run, however, its easy to walk out of the theater feeling confused and slightly tired, rather than challenged and engaged.
Two and a half stars, with a minus.
March 24, 2010
