Motley Group of Mourners on Solid, Witty ‘Train’ to Funeral

When screenwriter Daniele Thompson was visiting the dying Francois Reichenbach, the documentary filmmaker suddenly announced, “By the way, I want to be buried in Limoges.” When Thompson, trying for a light touch, joked, “No, not Limoges, it’s a long way, who wants to go to Limoges?,” Reichenbach’s reply in turn provided the inspiration and the title of Patrice Chereau’s quixotic and beguiling “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train,” which he wrote with Thompson and Pierre Tidivic.

In the film, Reichenbach’s wonderful line is spoken on the soundtrack by a celebrated dying painter and teacher, Jean-Baptiste Emmerich (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a 70ish gay man as charismatic as he is manipulative. Although he officially succumbs to heart failure he reportedly also had grown bored with life, tired of painting and of playing games with his friends. But he can’t resist making his large, complex and diverse retinue jump through one final hoop by requiring them to travel from Paris to Limoges, where his twin brother, Lucien (also Trintignant), years before reluctantly assumed the responsibility of running the family shoe-manufacturing business and stayed on in the gloomy grandeur of an ancestral estate.

Jean-Baptiste would seem to have always had his way with any man he wanted while turning women into devoted acolytes. It’s a motley crew, to say the least, that has gathered at a Paris train station to head for Limoges, a journey of several hours.

Two sets of key figures emerge. There’s Jean-Baptiste’s nephew Jean-Marie (Charles Berling), long estranged from his widowed father, Lucien, and in a disintegrating marriage with Claire (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi). Meanwhile, Francois (Pascal Gregory) is a trim, sensitive man of perhaps 50 who may have been the lover who cared the most for Jean-Baptiste. He is himself in a faltering relationship with Louis (Bruno Tadeschini), a dark, intense man who looks to be in his late 30s and who at last encounters a moody young man, Bruno (Sylvain Jacques), who first caught his eye three years earlier. What he doesn’t know is that Bruno is along for the ride because he seemingly was a lover of both the dead artist--and Francois. In an instant there’s a shifting emotional triangle between the three men that is as volatile as Jean-Marie and Claire’s marriage.

“Those Who Love Me” is a marvel of solid construction, with brisk movement and shrewd, witty observation of human strengths and weaknesses, its skittish moods buoyed by an inspired selection of mainly pop songs, including even James Brown’s version of “My Way.” Aboard the train there are plenty of fireworks, but the funeral, the actual lowering of Jean-Baptiste’s body into the ground, with some 20 people taking turns in covering his coffin with shovelfuls of dirt, has a sobering effect on the mourners.

More displays of angst occur at the wake at the Emmerich chateau, but a lighter tone gradually emerges. At last Jean-Baptiste’s friends, lovers and relatives are free of his compelling thrall; conceivably, he wanted them to gather one last time to experience a feeling of collective liberation from him.

In this final section two more key figures emerge; Lucien, who is not without his own charm but who has in effect lost his wife, son and in a sense his life to his more dazzling brother; and Viviane, one of Jean-Baptiste’s legion of lovers, who was once Frederic but is now a pre-op transsexual, played with warmth and gallantry by Vincent Perez, one of the French cinema’s top romantic stars. There’s a moment of flirtation between Lucien and Viviane that is funny and touching; they may be the two wisest people in the film.

Chereau’s splendid ensemble cast includes Marie Daems as the ebullient Lucie, whose claim to fame is that she had an affair, most likely at her instigation, with Jean-Baptiste in Madrid in 1952. She proclaims, in a burst of proud, deluded self-importance, that for the artist “I was woman!”

Chereau has admitted that while drawing upon Reichenbach’s remark and his penchant for complicated, partitioned-off friendships, that for the character of Jean-Baptiste, barely glimpsed but whose presence is always felt, he drew inspiration from his own father. Yet he has also said that he sees himself “everywhere” in his film. In the end, “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train” is in the grand French tradition of depicting the eternal human comedy with a compassion balanced by a wry, unsentimental detachment.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: language, adult themes and situations, sexual candor.

‘Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train’

(‘Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train’)

Jean-Louis Trintignant: Jean-Baptiste and Lucien Emmerich

Pascal Gregory: Francois

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi: Claire Emmerich

Charles Berling: Jean-Marie Emmerich

Vincent Perez: Viviane

A Kino International release of a Telema/Le Studio Canal Plus/France 2 Cinema/Azor Films production. Director Patrice Chereau. Producer Charles Gassot. Screenplay by Daniele Thompson, Chereau, Pierre Tidivic; based on an original idea by Thompson. Cinematographer Eric Gautier. Editor Francoise Gedigier. Costumes Caroline de Vivaise. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

At the Nuart through Thursday, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A., (310) 478-6379.