One Night, A Train

André Delvaux, as co-founder of the Belgian film school and institute INSAS (Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion) in 1962 and maker of the first Flemish-language feature film in 1966, is now regarded as the father of Belgian cinema. After working in documentaries for television, he adapted the novel The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short by Hermann Thiery, a Belgian modernist poet who had written in Dutch under the nom de plume Johan Daisne. His novels are categorized as "magic realist" and Delvaux's second film, Un Soir, un Train/One Night, A Train, was based on another Daisne novel, De trein der traagheid, or The Train of Inertia, published in 1950. 

Told in the style of magic realism, the story is presented directly and matter-of-factly, even when logic goes off the rails - literally in the case of One Night, A Train. Mathias (Yves Montand) is a middle-aged professor of linguistics who lives and teaches in Leuwen, a city in Flemish Belgium. He has just published, and a local theater is producing, a Flemish translation of the morality play Everyman in which the figure of Death is one of the dramatis personae. Anne (Anouk Aimée) is the designer for the production and she is Mathias's lover. She is having difficulty finding a proper way to present Death in the play. 

Mathias is shown to be a conscientious teacher, willing to spare time for his students, but he is a detached and diffident lover to Anne. The Flemish students at the university go on strike to protest the precedence of French, instead of Flemish, in classrooms, and Mathias claims to support them. To complicate matters, despite considering marriage to Mathias, Anne wants out of their relationship because she is French, is unacquainted with his colleagues and feels like she can only share half of his life in the Flemish town. 

Mathias isn't a sympathetic character. He evidently prizes his lovely mistress, but he won't marry her because a French wife could compromise his career. When they eat a dinner of oysters and good wine (Montrachet '61) at her place, he is more interested in what he is eating than what she is saying. He promises his mother, who is in a nursing home, that he will lay flowers on his father's grave, but when he gets to the cemetery, after having an argument with Anne on the road, he can't locate his father's grave. Not knowing what to do with the flowers, he drops them on bare ground. 

Mathias is going by train to lecture at a nearby university. Though they fought before his departure, Anne enters the train compartment where he is sitting and asks him for his copy of Le Monde. It's an odd, uncomfortable moment between them. There are four other passengers in the compartment. With Anne sitting opposite him, stunningly out of place, and the other passengers trying not to notice one another, Mathias recalls (in flashback) when he and Anne were on a guided tour of Rotherhithe, the old docklands in London given by an Englishman (Michael Gough). Just as they sit opposite each other on the train while barely acknowledging each other, their tour of London shows them together but very much apart. Looking at her sitting across from him, Mathias shakes his head, knowing that it is somehow impossible between them. But why? We are shown another flashback, this one to autumnal woods. Mathias and Anne are together, admiring their surroundings, while a man in the distance is chopping wood. Mathias turns but Anne isn't there. He looks around, calling out her name, and then he sees her at the edge of the wood. They embrace, but Mathias has his eye on the man chopping wood. Suddenly there are glimpses of a flashing siren and the wreckage of a train. Mathias has fallen asleep in the train compartment, as has everyone else. Mathias wakes to find Anne is no longer there. He leaves his compartment to look for her. From this halfway point on, the film proceeds nimbly into quite strange territory, until it reaches a foreshadowed conclusion. 

How refreshing to watch a film whose meaning isn't immediately forthcoming, that draws one into a mystery that initially seems impenetrable, a narrative that takes us deeper into a surreal locale in which actuality and fantasy are indistinguishable. The personal nightmare of a linguist is one in which everyone speaks a language that he doesn't understand. Mathias finds himself in just such a place near the end of the film, before we are jolted back to reality, in which we learn the cause of Mathias's dreamlike sojourn. 

One Night, A Train opens with images of a wintry landscape passing from the window of a train while, under the credits, a woman sings "La fleur de l'été" with words written by Delvaux: 

The flower of summer 

lasts until autumn 

is pruned in the winter 

and reborn in spring. 

Love that blossoms 

from summer to autumn 

fades and stiffens 

in the white winter frosts. 

Yves Montand is utterly convincing as Mathias, a linguist, successful and celebrated in his field, who cannot find the words to dissuade Anne from leaving him. He is especially affecting in the wordless interplay with Anne in the train compartment, his hangdog face running the gamut of emotions from tenderness to hopelessness. Anouk Aimée, sphinx-like as always, is at least given a substantial role. Her striking looks (her luxe wardrobe supplied by VOG) always suggested depths, even as her roles grew steadily superficial. One wonders what a not-so stunning actress would've made of Anne. (Incidentally, the photo used in the movie poster is the film's final shot, but shows Aimée with her eyes open.)

André Delvaux managed a career with difficulty through the 1970s, in French-language co-productions shot in Belgium, assembling around him an impressive group of collaborators, from the excellent cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet to the classical composer Frédèric Devreese. He followed One Night, A Train with Rendez vous à Bray in 1971, and the film I regard as his masterpiece, Belle, in 1973. 

I should add that, as I watched the end credits crawl in my living room where I watched One Night, a Train, rising from a chair I had placed in front of my flat screen TV so that I could appreciate the film without putting on my glasses, I felt something of what I once felt when I watched a film in a theater, pulling myself together at the end, coming back to the present after being transported to another realm. How I miss that feeling.