Un soir, un train (1968) - film review

Mathias is professor of linguistics at a Belgian university.  Although middle-aged, he is unmarried, but has a mistress, Anne.  Their relationship looks as if it may be coming to an end, but Mathias tries to rekindle the flame.  After a passionless dinner together, Mathias leaves to catch a train to a town where he is to give a lecture.  On the train, Mathias is delighted to see Anne enter his compartment.  The couple are unable to talk with one another and Mathias falls asleep.  Having dreamt about a train accident, Mathias awakes to find his train has stopped and Anne has vanished.  When he leaves the train to investigate, the train continues on its way, leaving Mathias and two other men stranded in open countryside.  Under nightfall, the three men make their way to a nearby village which is strangely silent.  When they finally meet the locals, Mathias is surprised that he cannot recognise their language.  Where is he, and what has happened to his beloved Anne?

André Delvaux directed this haunting mélange of dream and reality, his second full-length film after his acclaimed L’Homme au crâne rasé (1966).  Delvaux’s work is strongly influenced by other great directors (Resnais, Coctau, Buñuel...), and also by the great tradition of Flemish art. His films consequently have a strong aesthetic sense that is unique to the director.  Un soir, un train probably best exemplifies Delvaux’s technique of weaving together real experiences with those of the imagination, rather like Resnais but with a darker, almost macabre, kind of poetry.

Being Belgian, one of the biggest concerns in Delvaux’s life was that of being able to communicate with others.  In a country where two languages prevail with equal rigour (but with an unspoken understanding that French was the preferred language), this is hardly surprising.  It is a theme which recurs in much of Belgian art, and one that assumes paramount importance in the work of André Delvaux.  The couple who cannot speak to one another in this film is a metaphor for a nation that is divided by a linguistic barrier.  Then, in the remarkable dream sequence (which fits so well with the rest of the film that you hardly notice it as a dream as such), we have the absurd situation of a university professor being stranded in a village where he cannot communicate with anyone.  It is as though an unbridgeable gulf exists to separate Mathias from those he tries to speak with – that gulf being perhaps the unreal frontier between life and death.  He sees death in front of him, but whilst he remains mortal he cannot commune with it.  Parallels with Cocteau’s Orphée (1949) are easily seen.

For such a rigorously intellectual film, Un soir, un train is profoundly humanist and strangely compelling.  The calibre of a director can often be gauged by the actors he selects for his film, and on this basis Delvaux is a genius.   The couple Yves Montand and Anouk Aimée are perfectly cast – Aimée’s ethereal distance contrasting beautifully with Montand’s sombre, darkly introspective presence.  The two actors manage to portray the sense of emotional separation between their characters brilliantly, like trains moving slowly but inexorably apart.  Mathias’ apparent loss at the end of the film, when he emerges from the dream of his imagination into the dream that is living consciousness, is not just heartfelt; it is devastating.

© James Travers 2005

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EXCEPTIONEL! This is the best film I have ever seen - I hope it might be possible to show the film on TV, because there are obviously no DVDs. I saw the film in 1968 and I was rather impressed. It is a very good story mixing reality and imagination. Both Yves Montand and Anouk Aimée are playing their roles fabulously.
Mathias Roggentin (Germany) 

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