Comedy’s Not the Right Track for ‘Train of Life’

With “Train of Life,” writer-director Radu Mihaileanu came up with a clever premise, but you wish he’d played up its potential more for suspense than for broad ethnic humor. To give him credit, he does end on an unexpected note that casts all that comes before in a different light. But so much of this French-language film is tiresome in its relentless reliance on country-bumpkin humor.

The time is the summer of 1941, somewhere in rural Eastern Europe. A young man, Shlomo (Lionel Abelanksi), is running through the forest as fast as he can to his home village with the news that the Nazis have evacuated all the Jews from a clearly not-too-distant community.

Since Shlomo, a mystic, is considered the village fool, the shtetl elders don’t take kindly to his suggestion that the entire community escape via a fake deportation train, heading for the Ukraine in a circuitous route to Palestine.

But the Rabbi (Clement Harari), who knows of Nazi executions and the deportation of Jews to “God knows where,” sees that Shlomo’s idea may well be his people’s only chance to escape. The elders appoint the community’s prosperous woodworker Mordechai (Rufus) as the man to play the Nazi commander in charge of the train.

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The best approach to “Train of Life” is to take it as a fairy tale from the start--as so much wishful thinking. This lends some credibility to the comparatively leisurely manner in which the exodus gets underway and for the numerous stopovers for rest and relaxation that seem lifted from “Fiddler on the Roof,” complete with klezmer music--especially when a group of gypsies join the flight.

Certainly, Mihaileanu is affectionate and inventive, but you wish he had aimed higher, trying for more realism and relying less on shtick. There are serious, tender moments but not enough of them to offset, for example, a labored treatment of an unprepossessing young man who decides that communism is the only answer. (It’s not for nothing that Mihaileanu is a refugee from Romania).

The veteran Harari, backed by Abelanski and Rufus, does much to hold this most expansive of pictures together through his ingratiating portrayal of the wise Rabbi. But too much of the film is not inspired enough in its humor to overcome the queasy feeling that comes from watching a comedy-adventure involving Jews during the Holocaust.

We in the audience are aware of the magnitude of the Nazi evil of which its targeted victims being depicted on screen still have only an inkling.

It’s therefore awfully tough to find anything very funny in their predicament.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality and nudity. Times guidelines: adult themes and situations.

‘Train of Life’

(‘Train de Vie’)

Lionel Abelanski: Shlomo the Dreamer

Rufus: Mordechai The Woodworker

Clement Harari: Rabbi

A Paramount Classics of a French-Belgian-Romanian-Dutch co-production: Noe Productions-Le Studio Canal Plus (France), /Raphael Films (Belgium)/71 A (Romania)/Hungry Eye Lowland Pictures (Netherlands). Writer-director Radu Mihaileanu. Cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, Laurent Dailland. Editor Monique Rysselinck. Music Goran Bregovic.. Costumes Viorica Petrovici. Art director Cristi Niculescu. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

At selected theaters.