Train Of Life

As a gag, Jews passing as Nazis has been done before -- To Be or Not Be, The Great Dictator, The Producers -- so there are plenty of echoes to contend with in this French feature about a Romanian shtetl that fakes its own deportation to evade Nazi capture. Unlike the controversy that's beginning to surround Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, Train isn't so much humor about the Holocaust as it is humor imagining a way out of the Holocaust. The fake Nazis become masters of ridicule. They shave their beards, cut their sidelocks, don uniforms, and practice their German. On one Friday night during the train's journey to Palestine, they daven in an open field in full uniform. And once a Marxist contingent develops among the Jews and a train of Gypsies passing as Nazis comes along, Communists are calling Jews Nazis, Nazis are dancing with Nazis to Gypsy melodies, and we forget (until the very last frame) about the horror behind the farce. At the Coolidge Corner, November 12 at 7 p.m.

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Train of Life