Night Train to Lisbon
by Bille August
Raimund Gregorius (Jeremy
Irons) is a man who doesn’t sleep. A man who lost the sparkle of life
too. He is a teacher in Berne and totally devoted to his work. One day he saves
a woman from jumping in the cold waters of the river. The woman vanishes but
leaves behind a red coat, an old book by a Portuguese doctor, and a train
ticket to Lisbon.
The mystery of this book
and a sparkle of irrational push Gregorius to travel to the Lisbon home of Adriana (Charlotte Rampling), who's
Ken-doll-handsome brother, doctor Amadeu (Jack Huston, in flashbacks), was
involved in undermining Salazar's regime with his best friend (August Diehl),
until a smart beauty (Melanie Laurent) came between them.
Story of a book within a book, Night Train to Lisbon is German-Swiss-produced, spoken in English,
an adaptation of Helvetian philosopher-author Pascal Mercier. The result, however, is an
un-emotional movie that feels like a tedious filmed conference call.
But Jeremy Irons seemd
to be quite optimistic about the fate of this film, which success, he assumed
in our interview, will take the film crew on a "Train to Tombouctou"
follow up...
Raimund Gregorius' loneliness and intellectualism are
established by an early scene of him playing chess against himself... And this
sets the tone of the entire film!
Irons is a watchable actor, but here he evoluates between
a repressed guy in uggly glasses to ever so slightly less repressed guy in
cooler glasses...
The project fails as the film evolves by insisting on the
boring love triangle, rather than on the writer, or by insisiting on the
phrases of the book as read by Irons...A book full of aphorisms that are maybe
about the level of a 4 years old' "Book of Philosophy" that we
might leave in the bathroom for our kid's next solitary confinements...
And as we cannot really grasp the mysterious force that
pushed Gergorius to board that train, we, specators, feel as passengers of
the wrong train.
It is a dellusion of which we cannot distance throughout
the film...
Perhaps the writings themselves should have been left a
mystery to the audience?...
Perhaps the Gregorius story could have been left out
altogether?...
Perhaps Irons could have been given an insolent twist?...
One could only imagine how many ways there could have
been to make this film a little more colorful, a little more lively and
surprising.
Passeistic and entirely devoid of tension, the picture
makes the Portuguese Resistance look about as dangerous as eating a pastel
de nata.
Night Train to Lisbon tries to appropriate the Pascalian ideea that
it is not the hunted deer that counts
but the hunt itself…
But Bille August’s attempt fails according to this
same ideea, stuck in its banal rethorics as profound as a fairwell at the train
station…
GD
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