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THE
LAST TRAIN
5/10
Posledniy
poezd : Russia 2003 : Alexey A GERMAN : 82 mins
 Thoughts
that chug into and out of your mind during The Last Train
1) Get a move
on
2) Funny
that a picture about World War Two should be made by "a Russian"
named "A German"
3) War
is hell
4) There's
always somebody worse off than yourself
5) Things
are never quite as bad as they seem
6) For
f*ck's sake, get a move on
So, we're
somewhere in Russia. End of the war. Icy winter in stark monochrome. The
Germans know the jig is up, but we're a long way from the main 'theatre'
here so it's a kind of limbo. The characters know they are no leading
men in this drama: one of them reveals that he once hoped to play Hamlet
but had to settle for Rosencrantz instead. Bit-part players adrift in
a cold-war purgatory, and don't they just know it: "No plot, no drama...
pointless!"
Your classic
breath-freezing-in-the-air scenario. The surroundings not so much landscape
as tundra, beautiful to look at but not a nice place to be either outdoors
or indoors, especially when indoors has become outdoors because the buildings
are in ruins, doors and windows a cruel memory. Portly German surgeon
Fishbach (Pavel Romanov) arrives by what's presumably "the last train"
if that not-so-cheery title is to be believed. He finds the "hospital"
to which he's been posted. It's a wreck, crazed pistol-toting Nazis running
casually, psychotically amok (no need to say "freeze" in these
temperatures). Everybody coughing their guts out. A Tarkovskyish horse
clip clops through a room.
Fishbach flees,
slowly, into the countryside. Populated by consumptive old soldiers on
the verge of fading away, hapless civilians hiding in rudimentary shacks.
A minor but vicious battle eventually barrels its chaotic way through
the area. Casualties everywhere. Frost descends. More hacking coughs (are
they paid per great expectoration?) "I had a dream today. I don't
remember it." Hypothermia beckons as the coldest circle of hell slowly
freezes over. Night refuses to fall - too cold. Stasis horrors at zero
and below. Dialogue at a minimum, but chunks of existential philosophising
nonetheless... Dramatic inertia... An exercise in grinding misery? "No
one will come for us. We'll all die here." Hmm.
German is
the son of another Alexey German, the director of a handful of acclaimed
pictures over the last 30 years or so, including Khroustaliov, My Car!
(1998). This lineage perhaps explains why so many critics have been
keen to give German Jr the benefit of the doubt. That and his virtuouso
camerawork, his eye for cool compositions. The audience at the Edinburgh
Film Festival's public showing on the afternoon of 24th August 2004, perhaps
not knowing of German's ancestry, didn't seem quite so charitable - excited
anticipation was rapidly eroded by the picture's punishing tedium. Mutterings
of discontent as the disappointed punters shuffled through the exits.
And yet, such
a reaction is presumably exactly what German is after. Paradoxically,
the more grindingly unbearable the movie, the greater his success. The
clear intention is to show that war is a dehumanising, bone-chillingly
awful business. And the most direct means of getting across this message
is to make the film as grim and bleak as possible, to pile on the
misery to the point of self-parody and beyond - though Andrei Tarkovsky
didn't need to go anywhere near so far with his rural-set, WW2
debut, Ivan's Childhood.
For German, however, war - rather like movie-making - turns out to
be long stretches of tense waiting punctuated by disorienting blasts of
semi-chaotic action.
In theory,
The Last Train should ideally last four or five hours at least:
Bela Tarr would
surely have prolonged the agony way beyond conventional feature length,
safe in his reputation as "challenging" auteur. This is German's
debut, however, and all he dares risk is a relatively skimpy 82 minutes,
which means we're kind of in and out before the film really been able
to exert its full brain-freezing horror. But we nevertheless get the point,
and it's still advisable for audiences to load up on Red Bull or black
coffee - or both - before entering the cinema.
6th September,
2004
(seen 24th August : Filmhouse Edinburgh : public show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 58th Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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