Another Glance at the Train of Life
By Ray Pride
"Train of Life" is an unlikely success, the third movie filmed in Europe in as many years -- following "Life is Beautiful" and "Jakob the Liar" -- that takes a comedic approach to dealing with the Holocaust. This new film, which is now showing at selected U.S. theaters, is garnering national and international accolades. It has taken audience nods at film festivals as far-flung as Sundance, Miami and the Hamptons. It also won best foreign-language film at Italy's prestigious Donatello Awards.
The French-language film is a parable about a community rising above the needs of any individual during World War II. Among its critical reviews: Newsday's film critic John Anderson pronounced the second feature by the 41-year-old Romanian-born, Jewish poet/writer/director Radu Mihaileanu (pronounced MEE-hel-lon-oo) to be "what every Holocaust comedy should be."
That description sounds quite irreverent, but it gets at something about how fresh the unpretentious tenderness and joy seems in the simple, sweet fable-folktale-story. It's 1941 (or the year 5701 of creation) in a bucolic shtetl when Shlomo, the village idiot, brings news of the Nazi death camps.
When the rabbi and the wise elders deliberate on what must be done, Shlomo is ready with a suggestion: fake their own deportation. The result is absolutely nutty, yet life-affirming as everyone pitches in to this mass hallucination. The journey is filled with music, humor, dreams of escape and Shlomo's visionary bursts of poetry and inspiration.
Writer/director Mihaileanu has spent most of the past year traveling the festival circuit to show his film to audiences worldwide. JewishFamily.com caught up with him around the time he was premiering "Train of Life" to Los Angeles audiences.
A published poet, Mihaileanu speaks in the ardent cadences of someone who has thought about life's essentials. He chooses words -- in colorful yet imperfect Romanian-French inflected English -- that encompass the greater truths most of us haven't time to consider. Here are some excerpts from the interview.
GENJ: I like the idea of someone having a mad vision -- like Shlomo, your fool. Then we see all the steps a village takes to make his vision a reality. Your story's an exquisitely simple fable. Were you thinking of those kinds of stories?
MIHAILEANU: Yes. It is less that everybody says the film is on the Holocaust, it is more a film on that little village, that little shtetl and that civilization. I say the only relation with the Holocaust is that at one point in the film we understand that the Nazis killed that civilization, that kind of society, that kind of people. The way for me was to not speak in a frontal way about the Holocaust. My philosophy, in speaking about violence and about barbarians and barbarity in the world, is that I don't want to show that. If you show that, you do the same job that they do. You use violence, violence becomes banal.
GENJ: You focused on the shtetl.
MIHAILEANU: My way was to show those wonderful imperfect people who were in the shtetl, and that kind of life, and saying afterwards, "They did that [to them]." That is the only violence. But without showing that: There are no dead people, there is no blood in my film. There is no torture. I don't want to show that. I want to show the other side of the mirror. To give the audience beautiful characters--imperfect, completely imperfect. They fight each other, they are screaming, there are some idiots, and stupid, but they are wonderfully alive.
GENJ: "Train of Life" is so different from "Life is Beautiful." Watching Benigni's movie, you're often on the tightrope, wondering if he'll fall onto the side of gruesome bad taste. In "Train of Life," no one asks, "To what ends will you go to save yourself?" It's more about, "Will this tradition survive?"
MIHAILEANU: You got it. That's the big difference. It's not an individual adventure. [They all aim to get] to Palestine. All of the film is a collective adventure, and that is maybe my little message also for today, because we live in such a cynical world where everyone has just an individual adventure, and we feel that everybody needs again to have a collective adventure in this life. ...Even if we will always fight each other and have problems with each other, which is normal, it's less comfortable, but it's so wonderful to be with the other people.
GENJ: Did any Jews ever try to take over a train and transform it into a pseudo transport train?
MIHAILEANU: No, that's completely fake. It's completely a dream. A historian friend of mine told me somebody else discovered a similar story in a Moscow archive. I checked up in Israel, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the Washington Holocaust Museum. It never existed. During that time, a train could you only go five miles and be clandestine. Trains left unique trails, and each moment was a danger of accident with another train coming in front of you. That train went through stations, meaning that it was seen by the stationmaster, who could tell the other stations by Morse telegraph and it would be stopped. The story is completely impossible.
GENJ: So, what's the story about Roberto Benigni considering acting in "Train of Life" before he made "Life is Beautiful"?
MIHAILEANU: I sent him the script in February '96 and [asked] him to play the fool of the village, Shlomo. At that time, we had an Italian co-production, and they needed to finance the film with an Italian star. I sent him the script. He read it. He was very kind, and he called us back saying he loved his script but at that time he didn't want to act in the films of others. He wanted to concentrate on his own projects. That was all. Afterward, unfortunately, we had a lot of problems to finance the film. So we couldn't shoot in summer of '96. We shot one year later, in summer '97. During the shooting in Romania, I learned that he was editing a film on the same concept. But the films are completely different. His is an Italian comedy, an individual adventure, and it speaks about, "If you want to survive, you have to forget and lie to your kids."
GENJ: There's a very Eastern European feel to "Train of Life" reminiscent of Chagall and Isaac Bashevis Singer. You also show the lives of people in the village sort of like Ernst Lubitsch did in his 1939 anti-Nazi satire "To Be Or Not To Be."
MIHAILEANU: Yeah. The model for me was Bashevis Singer, Gogol [and] Sholem Aleichem. Lubitsch's film "To Be Or Not To Be" is fantastic because at the same time it treats very tragic events during the war and the Nazis with such fantasy and such big sprit that you feel proud to be a human being. I saw it so many times. [After seeing that film,] I feel proud to be a human being, to have that sense of humor, to be so intelligent in facing the Nazis who are so stupid. I was proud of my race of the human beings. So I think we serve to show people that we are not just having problems and that we are wonderful. There is a point we have to traverse the problems without ignoring them, but saying `We are marvelous, we are wonderful, imperfect but wonderful.' Don't forget that.
GENJ: You've commented before on how close tears are to being laughter.
MIHAILEANU: Yeah. but I'm not the first one saying that. That's very Jewish -- I don't know, maybe in other cultures too. In the Jewish culture and Jewish roots, we say that we are crying with one eye and we are smiling with the other one. That's very Jewish because all the time we lived so many tragedies, the only way not to become insane was to save our humor. That was the only weapon we had, because the other people burned us, they killed us, they chased us. The only weapon we have, very easy to carry when you go away, is the humor. Isaac Stern says he didn't play piano, he played violin for the same reason. He couldn't get away with a piano, but with a violin he could get away.
GENJ: What are your goals?
MIHAILEANU: You always try to make a better world for the next generation. And we can never succeed. But we have still to try. Because I believe that is our mission. To live, to be happy, to have humor and to try to make a better world.
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