Train of Life

In 1941 a small Jewish village in Eastern Europe learns the deportation trains are coming. The village madman brings a plan: build their own train, dress some of them as German soldiers, and cross the border pretending to have deported themselves. The village carries it out. The film is not interested in the escape. It is interested in the telling: it opens like a folk tale, proceeds as comedy, and in its final shot takes its whole tone back with one image. That ending changes who is telling the story and from where. The form is folk tale: bright costumes, klezmer music, noisy ensemble scenes and a village council in permanent argument. Radu Mihăileanu wrote and directed. The film coincided in 1998 with Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and the two were constantly compared; both sat at the centre of the argument about telling the Holocaust as comedy. Mihăileanu's own father escaped a labour camp in Romania. Lionel Abelanski plays the madman and Rufus the villager in the rabbi's role. Who it is for: viewers who like fable structure and films carrying tragic material with humour. Who it is not for: anyone who does not accept comedy in Holocaust narrative. The film stands on that line, and its last scene does not make it easier.