It’s always mildly astonishing to me how different people respond so differently to a movie or a novel. What one praises to the skies another can see nothing of value in. Conversation might smooth off the rough edges but essentially, after an exchange of views it remains, “I saw what I saw, and you…well…..”
I’d put Night Train to Lisbon on my ‘to-watch’ list some months ago, vaguely thinking it had to do with Portugal’s Nobel prize winning author José Saramago or possibly Fernando Pessoa, the great early 20th century poet, writer and philosopher of the country. When I settled in the other night I’d skimmed the day’s news, happy that Donald Sterling had gotten his comeuppance, the house was quiet, my wife had gone to sleep, and I thought I’d give the movie ten minutes to see if I should keep it on the list, or take it off.
I was gripped from the beginning.
Jeremy Irons, as Raimund Gregorius, is a quiet looking middle aged fellow, walking across a long bridge in a driving rain, beneath a black umbrella, when suddenly he sees a young woman poised on the railing, readying herself to jump. The umbrella escapes him, he rushes awkwardly forward, strewing the contents of his briefcase all over the wet side-walk, calling to her. She is distracted by the wind-caught umbrella careening over the slate gray water and he arrives, grabbing her around the legs, pulling them both down into a heap. What a start! A bit of everyday heroism many of us have played out in our minds from time to time. I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge twice a day and the question has come calling more than once or twice: what would I do?
Gregorius does not launch into an alarmed lecture or show himself to be someone who easily takes charge of things. He frantically gathers up his papers and seems, after a check that she’s not climbing back up, about to hurry on, when she asks if she can go with him. She is bedraggled, soaking, and thin, probably lovely beneath her despair. He says yes, with hesitation, and off they go.
It turns out he is a professor, teaching Marcus Aurelius (or Latin) to college age students. The woman sits briefly in the class, then departs, leaving the red coat she had been wearing, and disappears across the courtyard. Professor Gregorius lets her go then, consumed we imagine with fear she will return to the bridge, dashes out of his class, carrying the red coat and goes in search of her.
This is the last he will see of his class for the rest of the film — to his department head’s stupefied dismay. He finds an odd little book in pocket of her coat, learns from a bookseller friend it had been sold to a young woman the day before, and finds in it a ticket to Lisbon on the train leaving (Berne, Switzerland) in fifteen minutes. Gregorius arrives at the train platform, searches for the woman, not as a man of determination and adventure but one completely out of his comfort zone. He is unsure of himself, his eyes darting, trying to locate her or an idea of what he should do. Even his running is uncertain, on knees threatening to give out. At the last moment, he boards the train. Here he begins to read the book — which is the third ‘accident’ by which his life is changed.
[And one minor quibble here. Because everyone is speaking English, even with accents, it is glossed over that the book, written in Portuguese, is being read by a Swiss man, proficient in Latin but not, to our knowledge, in contemporary Romance languages; he must be translating as he goes, working at, rather than simply reading, the words which so impress him. It would have added to the importance of the book to him to have shown this.]
The rest of the film takes place in Lisbon as he tracks down the author, Amadeu de Prado [Jack Huston,] who he discovers had died on the eve of 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, in which, we find out, he had played a part. Gregorius follows from lead to lead, person to person in standard detective style, uncovering clues, memories (or refusals to remember), truths, fears and hopes. There is a bit of perfunctoriness to the unfolding — his sleuthing, a person found, a revelation, his sleuthing, a person found, a revelation– but because he is uncovering memories of the repressed brutality of the overthrown Salazar dictatorship (1936-1974), with intimations of torture and at least one scene of unbearable cruelty, it remains taut, keeps us in the tension of what will be revealed next? Why does the dead writer’s sister pretend he is still alive? Is there a mole, and who, in the small cadre of activist students? What will Mendez, the Butcher of Lisbon [Adriano Luz] do next to take out the cell? For most of the elderly characters, talking to Gregorius is the first they have spoken of their youth and their friendships, since those years. Even after decades in a relatively tolerant democracy, the fear, from their own experience, is too great. The perpetrators as well as the victims circle uneasily in the unexpected dispensation.
Throughout, the presence of the writer is kept with us as Gregorius reads sections of Amadeu’s book, which has been profoundly moving to him. [Is this the first and only movie in which the search for the girl disappears in the search for meaning and truth?] Philosophical aphorisms about life and death, choice and re-choosing are exchanged between the characters, or read by Gregorius, some of them quite Proustian, as,
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.
Or the thought of possibility ahead and that lost behind:
What could… what should be done, with all the time that lies ahead of us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Is it a wish, dreamlike and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life, and be able to take a completely different direction to the one which has made us who we are?
As the film develops we find their double application. Amadeu had written them during his participation in the Salazar resistance, risking his own life, being estranged from his family, falling in love and giving up love to save a life. What in other hands, might have been impossibly naive, say a passage about “the fear of not being able to become whom one planned to be,” takes on the weight of a life lived in terrible times, and of losses impossibly heavy. We see them doubled as Gregorius, shaken by what he is reading, is pierced by the same fear about his own life, though so differently and too quietly, lived. Against these lives thrown into momentous events and at great risk, his life is opened up, in Lisbon, by a woman whom he thanks, with great sincerity, “for thinking I’m not boring.”
Though I was wrong about Saramago or Pessoa having something to do with the film, the latter makes his appearance in an observation that “The fields are greener in their description, than in their actual greenness.”
A quiet, mysterious piano score by Annette Focks [listen under Team | Composer and Conductor] anchors the mood of reflection and inquiry of time.
I was mesmerized. What a fine film! I thought. The way a movie about mystery and history and resistance and self-questioning should be done.
Imagine my surprise then when I looked at responses from the critics when the film came out in December of 2013. Almost to a person they were dismissive, caustic, unhappy. Too slow, too pretentious, a perfect J. Alfred Pufrock, they said. I was baffled. Slow, yes, but for me in the best way. Gregorius had exactly the kind of laconic, under-expressed relation to the world that, his stoic exemplar Marcus Aurelius, urges. He is a man, late in life, cleaved by the reflections of the younger author, who “…talks about everything that’s preoccupied me for years,” as he confides to a woman who will be an important “accident” in his own life.
Perhaps Night Train to Lisbon struck me so strongly because I too, have wondered, and recently, over the lives I might have lived, the accidents, the other turnings, the self that only appears when I go back to places where it was left behind. Perhaps the raucous crew of commentators, yawning over Billie August’s slow and mesmerizing film haven’t had such experiences yet, certain of their choice to spend a life reviewing movies, perhaps too jacked on car-chases and corpses sprawling to appreciate a movie about real and terrible events and the real and terrible choices people make, or have made for them. As one of the first of the aging resistors says to Gregorius,
[The Swiss] wouldn’t know what it’s like to live without trusting, never to trust your friends, or family…
We feel this, we get it, and more deeply for the quiet, measured manner of its showing.
And, by the way, the mysterious girl who began his quest, reappears at the end, and is connected to all he has uncovered, in an infinitely sad, and convincing way.
As for me, now off to read the book from which it came. Pascal Mercier, aka Peter Bieri, seems to be a very interesting fellow.