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Train of Life

Train of Life (Train de vie)

Movie · 1998 · 15 people

Train de vie, released in Turkey as Hayat Treni and in English as Train of Life, is a 1998 tragicomedy by Radu Mihaileanu. Made in French, it is a co-production between France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel and Romania; Raphaël Films and Noé Productions are among the companies, and Frédérique Dumas, Ludi Boeken and Marc Baschet produced it. The screenplay is by Mihaileanu and Moni Ovadia, and the music is by Goran Bregović. It runs 103 minutes and opened in Turkey on 31 March 2000. It handles the Holocaust in an allegorical, almost comic manner.

The action is set in 1941 in a Jewish village in eastern Europe. The village fool, Shlomo (Lionel Abelanski), brings word that the Nazis are approaching; the Jews of the neighbouring villages have already been killed and their own turn has come. The villagers gather under the rabbi (Clément Harari) to find a way out, and Shlomo proposes an unusual idea: they will organise their own deportation train to escape deportation. Some villagers will play Nazi officers, others deported Jews, and a fellow villager will drive the engine. This imaginary train is their road to survival.

Rufus plays Mordechai and Michel Muller plays Yossi. The cast also includes Gad Elmaleh, Agathe de La Fontaine, Bruno Abraham-Kremer and Marie-José Nat.

DirectorRadu Mihaileanu
Production companyRaphaël Films

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Cast

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Rufus Rufus Actor · 83 years old Lionel Abelanski Lionel Abelanski Actor · 62 years old Michel Muller Agathe de La Fontaine Gad Elmaleh Bruno Abraham-Kremer Clément Harari Georges Siatidis Johan Leysen Marie-José Nat Michel Israël Serge Kribus Luminiţa Gheorghiu Eugenia Bosânceanu Rudi Rosenfeld

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Through different eyes

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Telling the Holocaust through an allegory that is almost funny is one of the riskiest tonal choices cinema can make. Mihaileanu's premise is extremely strong: a village that builds its own deportation train to escape, some villagers playing Nazi officers and the rest the deported Jews. That setup contains a theatre, a game of role-play, within itself, and the film draws its richest moments from that doubleness. Its weakness, in my view, is that the farce at times smothers the tragedy; some comic stretches struggle to carry the weight of the idea, and the tonal balance does not always hold. Not flawless, but brave, original and worth arguing about.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

The film centres on a Jewish village in Eastern Europe in 1941 and in doing so puts on screen a whole way of life on the brink of destruction. The villagers gathering under the rabbi to look for a way out form a portrait of a community debating its fate together. The allegory's most thought-provoking layer is the role reversal: some villagers having to take on the guise of the oppressor in order to survive raises questions about how identity and power can become a performance. Comic in costume, it rests on real history; the knowledge that the Jews of the neighbouring villages have already been killed hangs like a shadow over every scene.

Yeşilçam Nostalgic A viewer raised on the classics, looking for warm storytelling and strong acting.

That the village fool is the one who comes up with the escape plan recalls a lovely reversal from the old tales: the one whose wits are most looked down on carries the greatest hope. The film keeps that fairy-tale warmth without letting the pain be forgotten; it says that even in the darkest times people need to laugh and hold on to one another. Goran Bregović's score is like the story's heart, its swing between joy and sorrow tying the film's two faces together. A film with a firm moral centre and its heart in the right place.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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