What makes this sorry community worth visiting is the edgy energy of Gaviria's filmmaking, which telegraphs the relentlessly destablized nature of the characters' lives through constant camera movement accompanied by a steady underdrone of pop music and occasional swoops into a sort of magic realism sparked by a glue-addled girl's hallucinatory fantasy of a better life. The picture rarely gets inside the hearts of its mostly miserable population as deeply as it should, but what it conveys of their surroundings and activities is as vivid as it is disturbing.
Patrice Chereau's new drama, "Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le
train" ("Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train)," focuses on a more
limited community: an extended family gathered for a funeral that
prompts a variety of old memories and new experiences, many of them
pegged to offbeat sexual combinations and proclivities. There's as
much energy here as in any film of the festival so far, but while the
picture is as technically proficient as anyone could wish, there's no
sense of real connection with the characters or their emotionally
complicated situations. Chereau never runs short of sound and
fury&emdash;his bodice-ripping "Queen Margot" proved that once and
for all&emdash;and he can craft a resonant image when he wants to, as
in a haunting shot of the great Jean-Louis Trintignant sitting gaunt
and withdrawn in one of the movie's rare moments of stillness. In the
end, though, there's less going on here than all the fuss and bother
would lead one to expect.
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