“How to brainstorm a genre screenplay” is trotted out and exposed for the amusing and mundane process it is in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s goof of a thriller, “Trans-Europ-Express.”
Every trope, all the cliches and archetypal characters, the “How do we get from Paris to Antwerp?” problem solving of the plot, where to introduce “the gun,” the obligatory nudity and sex — including 1960s bondage — it’s all laid bare in this spoof from the screenwriter of the obscurant “Last Year at Marienbad” and director of “Successive Slidings of Pleasure.”
Robbe-Grillet was a “cult” director, “cult” screenwriter and plainly a man with a sense of humor about the mental or erotic titillations that were his specialty. Because ’60s-dated or not, “Trans-Europ Express” still plays, still amuses and still “applies” when it comes to formula films like the one it sends up.
Three filmmakers — a director, producer and script supervisor — board a train in the Gare du Nord station in Paris. The moment they settle into a compartment, “We should set a film on a train like this” (in French with English subtitles) occurs to them.
The director (Robbe-Grillet) gets his script supervisor (Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his wife) to break out a tape recorder to take notes. It’s a suitcase-sized portable reel-to-reel, a ’60s tech joke “Austin Powers” missed. With the producer (Jérôme Lindon) pitching in, they conjure up a plot.
How does one get cocaine from Paris to Antwerp? Where can you buy a “false bottom suitcase?” Wouldn’t our “trafficker” be more likely to smuggle diamonds in and out of Antwerp?
An actor crosses their field of view. “Isn’t that (Jean-Louis) Trintignant? He’d be PERFECT” for this!
We see the trenchcoated Trintignant — of “And God Created Woman,” “Z,” “Under Fire” and in 2012’s “Amour” — side-eye everyone and everything, doing his best version of “sketchy.” He shops for a suitcase. “The trafficker model. Just kidding.”
He is eyed by the sexy stranger (Marie-France Pisier of “Cousin, Cousine” and Truffaut’s “Love on the Run”). Who is she? “An agent for a rival gang!” “An amateur detective?”
Over the course of the train ride, the trio dreams up an absurdly convoluted plot that involves multiple suitcases and multiple handoffs, legions of middle-men and women and an ever-evolving code-phrase about when one last saw “Father Pettijohn.”
Leaky bags of sugar are loaded into the suitcase for a dry run. A small semi-automatic pistol of the era is hidden in a hollowed out paperback novel (about trains). Cops and “fake police,” an inspector, a fake blind man (Ivo Pauwels) and others aid, pursue or work with Jean, our trafficker.
Eva (Pisier)? She’s a sex worker, or a spy who asks questions.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an assassin.”
“Oh, a professional?”
“No, an amateur. Semi-professional, actually.
All these interruptions, arrests and interrogations?
“Tests.”
Our brainstormers send Jean from hotel to hotel, into a nightclub or two, one with a bondage show, train stations to drawbridges to dry docks.
Yes, he picks up a bondage magazine for the train ride. Yes, he buys rope. Will that play into “the whore subplot?”
What turns him on?
“Rape. Any rape.”
“All right. But it’s more expensive!”
It’s all weird and witty, and yes, one could totally imagine a film coming to life in just this way — plot, characters, complications, “Chekhov’s gun,” sex and violence, titillation and tension trotted out, debated and worked-out and shoved into the script on a train ride.
No, it never adds up to much or much that makes a lot of sense.
“Trans-Europ-Express” is like that ’60s train ride, mainly interested in simply getting from point A to point B, with requisite plot complications, a black and white tour of Antwerp and the Gare du Nord, hand-held tracking shots (camera work is glimpsed) on foot and in rail cars, vigorously obvious editing and kinky jokes that were daring for their time and can still push several politically incorrect buttons along the way.
If you want to take a 100 minute course in thriller cliches and how to apply them (right down to the obligatory “strip club” scene), Robbe-Grillet summons you aboard and announces “Class is in session” the moment he says “We should set a film on a train like this.”
Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, bondage, sex work jokes
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marie-France Pisier, Christian Barbier,
Ivo Pauwels, Jérôme Lindon,
Catherine Robbe-Grillet and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. A Lux/Kino Lorber release on Tubi, Amazon, et al.
Running time: 1:45
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