Patrice Chereau  

France 
 

Patrice Chereau's new film is inspired by a real-life event – before his death a few years ago, the Paris-based documentary filmmaker Francois Reichenbach asked to be buried next to his mother in Limoges. His friends were astonished by the request, but Reichenbach responded by saying that those who loved him would take the train.  

"The title is long but mysterious," Chereau admits. "Although gentle, it has the ring of an order." With his mysterious remark, Emmerich provokes a competition between his survivors. That, explains Chereau, is what the film is about. 

"Burials, as everyone can testify, are events that are, at the same time, both terrible and magnificent," says Chereau of his film's pivotal event. "They are harrowing days that can become brutally joyous, days when people anguished by the closeness of death come together in knowing a new appetite for life. Let's say that Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train is a film that's about making the best use of burials." 

In the emotional hothouse that such an event can provoke, Chereau chose to concentrate on two key themes. "Split-ups and meetings were the points from which the screenplay departed – paternity and marriage became the principle threads."  

Chereau freely admits that much of the film was inspired by events in his own life. Jean-Baptiste was the name of his own father, also a painter. "I have the feeling of being everywhere in this film, and not necessarily where one might think," concedes Chereau. "The two principal stories, those of the couple about to split up (Caire and Jean-Marie, played respectively by Charles Berling and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and the story of the three boys, the infernal trio (played by Pascal Greggory, Bruno Todeschini and Sylvain Jacques) contain parcels of my life, but modified and mixed up." 

Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train has a three-part structure, the train journey to Limoges where the burial takes place, the burial itself and a sequence in the family's house. Chereau admits that shooting for 14 hours on the SNCF train presented some technical problems. "It was something of a crazy project, one which I would never have been able to control without Eric Gautier, my cinematographer, who allowed me to shoot two-thirds of the film in CinemaScope and with a handheld camera." 

Chereau combines acting with directing. (He played Montcalm in Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans, reportedly winning the part in the face of stiff opposition from Jean Reno.) Given the scale of Chereau's previous film, the historical epic La Reine Margot (in which Chereau recreated the St Bartholomew Day massacre of the Protestants in bloodcurdling detail) it's perhaps a surprise that the director undertook another project posing such challenging technical demands quite so soon. "I could never have made this film without the liberty and confidence that the previous one brought me. Shooting La Reine Margot had the same effect on me as staging Wagner's Ring Cycle at Bayreuth. They were such enormous undertakings that one came out of them stronger, free of all strictures and far more at ease in crises."  Chris Darke