Train of Life

This French entrée in the growing genre of Holocaust comedies (exactly when did that become an acceptable phrase?) is a tale told by an idiot. The village idiot, to be exact -- Shlomo (Lionel Abelanski, bearing an appropriate resemblance to a pared-down Robin Williams), who opens the film by telling us a story in which he finds himself incapable of telling his fellow villagers another story: he's just witnessed the liquidation of a neighboring shtetl by invading Nazis. It's one of the film's few moments of any eloquence.

His listeners catch Shlomo's drift all the same, and they also seize on his suggestion that they might escape a similar fate by devising their own mock transport train, with phony guards, to take them to safety. Much low humor and crude parody follow, with the mock Nazis taking their roles too seriously and a mock communist movement springing up and turning the transport into a microcosmic train of fools. Director Radu Mihaileanu's trifle about the unthinkable has its artlessly moving moments, and its reliance on the fabulist frame tale to excuse its frivolity makes more sense than the same ploy in Life Is Beautiful and Jakob the Liar. Given such evil, a story may be the last resort, but maybe someone other than an idiot should tell it.

-- Peter Keough