MAN ON THE TRAIN (2002) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Patrice Leconte
Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Edith Scob
There's a little throwaway scene in Neil Jordan's "The Good Thief," where a gambler played by Nick Nolte and a police inspector played by Tcheky Karyo discuss the relative merits of French and American rock & roll musicians. Nolte mentions Dylan and Hendrix on the American side, and then asks sarcastically, "What have the French given us? Johnny Hallyday." To which Karyo replies, "Don't talk to me about Johnny Hallyday." The real Johnny Hallyday turns up in the first scene of "Man On the Train", gazing through bloodshot eyes out the window of a railroad car and looking like 50 miles of bad road and seven different kinds of warmed-over death. This is a guy who, if you saw him on a train, you'd immediately think a) What's he doing out of prison? and b) I hope he's not carrying a gun. Hallyday gets off in a small town where he makes the acquaintance of a retired professor (Jean Rochefort), and when it turns out the hotel's closed due to a lack of tourists, he moves into a room in the old man's house. Both men have big plans for Saturday. The professor is scheduled for open-heart surgery. Hallyday plans to rob the local bank. In the meantime, they've got three or four days to spend in each other's company, and as the time passes, each begins to see something in the other's life he thinks he's missed. So a little tentative transference takes place, as they try on bits and pieces of each other, just to see what it feels like and how the pieces fit. It's done with sly humor and marvelous restraint, the professor talking constantly, the stranger hardly at all. What happens to them on Saturday might not be what you expect, but then it's a little hard to know what to expect, except this: From that opening scene in the railroad car, you'll pay attention to Johnny Hallyday.
