Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998)

I perfectly understand the comment of the person who wrote that they needed a script. They do need better defined characters, an interesting story, a more intriguing atmosphere, more realistic scenes with recognizable reactions to human events, and perhaps something else that will make a viewer want to keep watching.

The characters in this movie are so grotesque that I kept expecting one to begin to eat another. First, the fact that people are in some kind of emotional pain does not thereby cause one to find them sympathetic - particularly when there is little attempt whatever to relieve each other's troubles. That is fine, so long as the characters are made nevertheless interesting - through their actions, their dialogue, something.

These eight or so principal characters seem to cry, rage, fight, yell, grab one another, insult one another, kiss each other, scream, slap, hug, kick -- non-stop without any dramatic build-up or suspense. It's just relentless displays of extreme emotion -

whether it's of someone truly sobbing after finding that the water in the bath is cold (yes,undoubtedly some metaphor, but so poorly done);

whether it's because someone else saw the deceased more recently than they;

whether it's because someone they fancy doesn't want to be buggered on a train;

-- or just for no reason at all.

This is awful stuff - a portrait of self-absorbed decadence without anything interesting to say - and to boot, it's excruciatingly slow because terribly muddled for a long time.

I don't at all mind working to figure out a movie - but there must be something intriguing to motivate the work. Thus, for example in Place Vendome, we don't know what is going on but it's well worth finding out. Not here - not with these characters who serve simply to embarrass those around them.

This is an ugly movie - not because the ugly side of people is realistically shown, but because characters who never become real are created -- to personify ugliness of character.

I had high hopes - and am very disappointed.