Lovers of surrealist cinema are acquainted mostly with the
names of Bunuel, Tarkovsky and at the most that of Cocteau and Has. However few
people can profess to have heard the name of Andre Delvaux(1926 – 2002), a
celebrated Belgian filmmaker, in this regard. I had the opportunity to watch
his 1968 film ‘Un Soir Un Train’(A Night in the Train), based on Johan Daisne's
book ‘De trein der traagheid’ and was enthralled by the subtlety of the
narration, the use of multilayered metaphors and the beautiful intertwining of
dreams and reality adding to the aspect of ambiguity in the movie. It is a very
demanding film and requires multiple viewing to make sense out of it. A brief
synopsis of the film is as follows.
Mathias(Yves Montand) is professor of linguistics in a
Belgian university, at a time when Belgium is plagued by Walloon
movements. He is a writer of Flemish plays as well and is morally opposed to
the cause of Walloons. Although middle-aged, he is unmarried, but has a
mistress, Anne(Anouk Aimée), who is a Frenchwoman, working as a costume
designer for a theatre. It is revealed that she is currently working on
the production of Mathias’s play ‘Elkerlyc’. Their relationship looks as if it
may be coming to an end. Anne feels alienated in her Flemish surroundings and
is also further aggravated by the fact that Mathias shows no inclination to
formalize their relationship. After a passionless dinner together,
Mathias and Anne board a bus which would take them to the railway
station, since Mathias needs to catch a train to a town
where he is to give a lecture. Anne wants to accompany him on the train,
but Mathias is uncomfortable about introducing her in his circle. This sparks a
heated debate among them. After alighting from the bus, Anne resolves to break
off their relationship and declares that she would be leaving Mathias forever.
However, on the
train, Mathias is delighted to see Anne enter his compartment, in spite of his
initial reservations about Anne accompanying him. The couple find
themselves incapable of speaking to each other and Mathias falls asleep. He has
a series of dreams. Through multiple jump cuts, we are shown a flashback of the
couple’s tour of England,
the previous year, Mathias watching Anne stand by the window of the train, a
scene in the woods and finally overlapping images of a train accident and
Mathias and Anne lying beside each other. Mathias awakes from this dream to
find his train has stopped and Anne has vanished. When he leaves the
train to investigate along with an old colleague Professor Hernhutter(Hector
Camerlynck) and an ex-student Val(François Beukelaers) , the train continues on
its way, leaving Mathias and the other two men stranded in the open
countryside. Under nightfall, the three men make their way to a nearby
village which is strangely silent. Throughout the journey, Mathias
recounts the circumstances under which he had met Anne. When they finally meet
the locals, Mathias and the others are unable to recognize their
language. They go to a nearby restaurant and are served food by a
beautiful waitress whose name is later revealed to be Moira(Adriana Bogdan).
The band stars playing a tune and Moira tries to engage them in the dance. Val
succumbs in spite of Mathias’s warning. After the dance gets over Mathias is
unable to find either professor Hernhutter or Val. He confronts the waitress
and suddenly goes into a fit.
The scene jump cuts to the site of the train accident and Mathias
wakes up from the fit. He finds the lifeless body of Anne in the barn along
with Val and breaks into tears.
The acting in the movie is top grade, especially in the
roles played by Yves Montand and Anouk Aimée(she appears in quite a contrasting
avatar compared to her role in Fellini’s ‘Eight and Half’). The music by Frédéric
Devreese blends perfectly with the enigmatic tone of the film. The treatment by
Andre Delvaux is very effective, with a straightforward narrative towards the
beginning, intended to disarm the viewers and make them unprepared for the
non-linear imagery that follows in the latter part of the movie. Let us now
look at the film from an analytical angle.
A principal theme of the movie is the linguistic barrier
between the Flemish Belgians and the Walloons (French speaking Belgians), which
has a long history in Belgium.
The relationship between Mathias and Anne becomes a metaphor for this
linguistic barrier. The fact that they are unable to speak on the train is a
further hint of this situation. However as the synopsis reveals, the latter
part of the movie is exceedingly complex since it becomes difficult to gauge
the transitions between dream and reality. On closer speculation, multiple
interpretations spring up, imparting an ambiguous nature to the film.
On first viewing, it seems that the scene of the train
accident shown earlier is not part of a dream, rather a real event demarcating Mathias’s
first dream from his second. Mathias passes out due to the accident and dreams
of the two other people, the village and his experiences out there.
However, on repeated viewing, several aspects take on new
proportions and hint towards other possible interpretations. Early in the
movie, the actors enacting Mathias’s play hold a discourse about the appearance
of death. They debate whether death should be represented in the traditional
getup according to middle age texts or should be inconspicuous (As Werner(Domien
De Gruyter) puts it, “In Mathias’s adaptation, death is among thousand other
things which could occur”). This discussion becomes relevant if we concentrate
on the following facts.
Firstly, the name of the waitress is Moira, which literally
means fate. Secondly, when Mathias warns Val about dancing with her and says,
“You don’t know what game she is playing”,
Val replies, “Her name is Moira. I understand her language. It’s
a miracle”. Later Mathias finds Val’s corpse along with that of Anne’s. These observations hint that Moira could be
the personification of fate or death (indistinguishable from any normal person
unlike the death in Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’). According to this
interpretation, the village can be thought of as a transition state between
life and death. Hence, the language barrier between Mathias and the villagers
act as a double metaphor, one being the symbolism for the linguistic barrier
between the Flemish and the Walloons and the other being the barrier between
life and death. Val understands Moira’s language when he submits to her,
thereby crossing the barrier. Mathias escapes her and comes back to life from
this near death experience.
Yet another possible interpretation could be considering the
whole sequence of events after Mathias getting on the train as a series of
multilayered dreams (in the same lines as ‘Inception’), from which he does not
wake up within the span of the movie. Though this interpretation is a bit
ambitious, certain facts like the entry of Anne into the compartment in spite
of their previous heated argument and the two of them being unable to
communicate, somewhat supports this conclusion. Moreover, the final sequence of
Mathias breaking down into tears beside Anne’s corpse is reminiscent of the
image of the two of them lying beside each other, which was a part of the
first(in this case the first level of) dream, which is also suggestive of the
above interpretation. According to this interpretation, flashback of the England tour,
the other overlapping imagery and the train accident are part of the first
level of dream. Mathias relapses into a second level of dream where his
interactions with the other two people and the experiences in the village take
place. On waking up from this second level of dream, he moves back to the first
level where he confronts the death of Anne and Val as a continuation of the
train accident. Mathias’s subconscious is troubled by his treatment of Anne,
the fact of their breakup and fabricates the event of Anne’s death as an
instrument of rebuke.
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It is difficult to say if Delvaux wanted stress on any
single interpretation. It is more likely that he wanted to keep the film
open-ended, which follows from the fact that he had given equal hints for each
of the possible interpretations. Therefore, it would be unfair to impose any
specific interpretation on this movie which aspires to remain ambiguous. This
gem of a movie showcases Delvaux’s mastery in every aspect of his craft. It is
immensely rewarding for people who enjoy surrealist, enigmatic, ambiguous and intellectually
satiating cinema.
References and Further Reading:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Delvaux
- http://filmsdefrance.com/FDF_Un_soir_un_train_rev.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walloon_movement
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waloons
The link is as follows:
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