Un Soir, Un Train (1968)

I wrote as few days back of the season of "lost" films from previous London Film Festivals now being shown at the NFT and how disappointed I was with my first selection.  I therefore wasn't exactly looking forward to seeing the above -- another French movie from the same period and another one set on a train.  At first my wariness seemed justified as the first half of the film verged on the boring as one followed the story of a linguistics professor (played by Yves Montand) at a university in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium and his somewhat strained involvement with a Frenchwoman (played by the very handsome Anouk Aimee) who continually feels like a duck out of water in his world.  The only compensating factors were some rather splendid landscapes straight out of the old Flemish Masters.  However when she joined him on a train journey, events took an 180 degree turn and we were suddenly in a scenario like something out of the paintings of Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux (no relation I think to the director Andre Delvaux).   Montand surfaces from a nap to find all the other passengers asleep, bar an older professor whom he recognises and a young man who was once his student.  When they disembark to discover why the train has stopped, they are immediately abandoned when the train suddenly pulls away.  They have no idea where they are or how to get back to their worlds until they eventually stumble on a strange village which initially appears deserted.  When they find its inhabitants who speak in an unintelligible language, we just know that they must be in a half-world between life and death.  Finally Montand finds himself back at the train which has been in a spectacular crash, but the film ends with his discovering that nothing can ever be the same for him again.  Perhaps some lost films do deserve to be rediscovered.