Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

 

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant as Elias; Marie-France Pisier as Eva; Christian Barbier as Lorentz; Charles Millot as Franck; Daniel Emilfork as policeman; Henri Lambert as police inspector; Alain Robbe-Grillet as Jean, the film director; Catherine Robbe-Grillet as Lucette

An Abstract Candidate

 

Assassins can be funny too.

Trans-Europ-Express is a meta-film, introducing three individuals - including director-writer Alain Robbe-Grillet himself and his life partner Catherine Robbe-Grillet - on the titular train line in France, imaging a film about drug smuggling which is the film we will be seeing playing out. Immediately a lark is had in imagining first a cartoonish version of this tale, with fake beards and a cartoon smoking bomb on board, but the production breaks the fourth wall constantly, alongside introducing Jean-Louis Trintignant as Elias, already in the midst of a drug smuggling plot when he briefly enters their car. Around him a story is set up, beginning with Elias getting on board with cocaine in a secret compartment in his suitcase and a book cut out to hold a pistol.

The film, more so than others from Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a flex in storytelling as a concept itself, a pulpy crime story which just happens to makes its artificiality know to the viewer throughout. Revisions to the story, trying to figure out what the tale is, happen and are usually caused by Catherine Robbe-Grillet's character making sure, as the secretary keeping audio recorded notes, that plot continuity is kept alongside the three questioning new ideas, such as considering (and rejecting) the idea to change to diamond smuggling. Plot holes are explained and they remove the cocaine on Elias' person, even completely ditching a plot thread and whole character by asking between each other why a young woman introduced onscreen would steal his suitcase in the first case for one considered twist.

It plays this narrative straight, but this game-within-a-game is compelling in itself. There is also how Elias has a fetish for bondage, seen when he hides a magazine, between a more respectable one, of female models posing tied up or wrapped in chains. This connects to Robbe-Grillet's own taste for this, but it is also part of the simulacra here too, the faking and constructing of scenarios, as he is introduced to a prominent character of Eva (Marie-France Pisier), a sex worker who he pays for a staged scenario of forced restraint and rape. That scene is going to make some viewers understandably uncomfortable, but it is all acted out as a consenting act by her and Elias, part of the games of the film as fiction as he will return to her to play out this bondage scenario.

She will play out a potential femme fatale role, as her connection to the criminal group Elias is trying to ingratiate himself within becomes more noticeable. The gang itself, playing to Alain Robbe-Grillet's films being about their stories being games or shifting in how they are staged, set out constant tests for Elias to react to, from the entire fake like of Father Petitjean the mythical drunk priest used for coding messages, to even staging fake cops apprehending him. Trans-Europ-Express is arguably one of the more accessible works for Alain Robbe-Grillet because it is a genre pastiche, which unlike Eden and After (1970) is more focused on the plot it is still undercutting. Elias' journey in the game, as it is being connected and made sense of by its creators, still becomes a crime story at heart even if the film knows it is all staged and plays to this. Even its style, the sleek cinematography by Willy Kurant, befits a pastiche of films like this from this era. Only its BDSM content really takes this to another tone, in mind to Robbe-Grillet's real life obsessions, but even this within the movie plays to the whole constructed nature. Even when this gets serious in the end, with everything closing in on Elias after he actually kills someone, the film openly undercuts this with a wink and a happy ending, reminding everyone viewing this elaborate and perfectly made film it is still a story.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Metatextual

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low