Radu Mihaileanu's gentle Holocaust fable
by Ray Pride
You haven't seen this movie yet.
But too many people will think they have, because "Train of Life" is the third movie to come from Europe in as many years that takes a comedic approach to the Holocaust. Yet the old-fashioned qualities of the second feature by the 41-year-old Romanian-born writer-director Radu Mihaileanu (pronounced MEE-hel-lon-oo) are what make it seem fresh. It's the end of the century, and filmmakers are embracing tenderness and joy in movies like this fable-simple and folktale-sweet story. A comedic parable about community rising above the needs of any individual, it begins in 1941 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: faking 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.
A published poet, Mihaileanu speaks in the ardent cadences of someone who's thought about the essentials of life, choosing words in colorful yet imperfect Romanian-French-inflected English, to encompass the greater truths most of us haven't the time to consider.
Mihaileanu's little shtetl is something out of the short stories of Isaac Singer or Sholom Aleichem, with a dash of Mel Brooks' "The Twelve Chairs" and an immense debt of respect to Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant anti-Nazi satire, "To Be Or Not To Be."
"Everybody says the film is on the Holocaust," Mihaileanu says. "It is more a film on that little village, that little shtetl and that civilization. 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."
Where "Life Is Beautiful" is a tightrope walk, with Roberto Benigni's star turn threatening to fall into bad taste at every turn, "Train of Life" remains focused on community. "You got it. That's the big difference," he says. "It's not an individual adventure, it's a collective adventure. 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 other people." Benigni had considered acting in "Train of Life," but dropped out without explanation. While shooting his film, Mihaileanu found out about Benigni's film. He has little to say, but that "His is an Italian comedy, an individual adventure, and it speaks about, 'If you want to survive, you have to lie to your kids.'" Beyond his own concerns, "To Be Or Not To Be" was his great influence. "It is fantastic because 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. I was proud of human beings. 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." Mihaileanu sees humor as the ultimate weapon. "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 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."
But innocence is to be preserved as well. "Shlomo, for me, he is the only one who sees the real horror," Mihaileanu says. "The poets and the fools are able to [keep their innocence]. Because they are escaping that little reality, that little prison where we go each day deeper and deeper. Their gaze is free. They are not prisoners so much of all the stupid images and official points of view. I love those people because they push the humanity. We forget, we take too much the reality and all those official opinions that are there to fool people. We are just a little planet with little insects, but what beautiful insects we are."
"Train of Life" is now playing.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.