This 1998 pan-European production, known most widely by its French appellation, Train de Vie, starred at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, but was seen by precious few American moviegoers. Critically acclaimed through much of Europe (the trailer above is from Italy), Train of Life is a tragicomic tale about a village of Jews escaping the Holocaust by building their own deportation train. Some in the group masquerade as Nazis, while others act as detainees on the way to concentration camps (their real destination is Palestine). The film’s darkly antic humor comes from its Romanian director, Radu Mihaileanu, who fled to France as a student to escape his home country’s communist dictatorship. Passages of the movie are deeply satirical — at one point, the train’s passengers splinter off into myriad political factions — while others are uproarious and mad. Who wouldn’t want to watch a nighttime dance-off between the runaway Jews and another band of runaway Gypsies? Ultimately, though, it’s hard to forget that this is a film about the Holocaust. And its main character, the Jewish group’s village idiot, is a Shakespearean fool of the highest order, capturing both the absurdity of this farce and the very real horror underlying it all.
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