Night Train To Lisbon (3 Stars)

This is a slow moving political thriller based on a best selling novel with the same name.

Dr. Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher in the Swiss city Berne. He lives a boring life. That's what his ex-wife tells him, and he believes it himself. One day, on the way to school, he sees a young woman about to throw herself off a bridge. He pulls her back from the edge, but he's still worried about her. He takes her into his classroom and tells her to sit at an empty desk, despite the giggling of the children. After a few minutes she walks out, leaving her coat behind.

He runs out of the classroom, but he's too late to see where she's gone. The only clue is a book in her coat pocket, the memoirs of Amadeu de Prado, a man who trained to be a priest but then became a doctor. The words of the book hold deep philosophical messages which make him consider the meaning of his own life. Between the pages of the book he finds a train ticket to Lisbon. He goes to the station, hoping to see her getting on the train, but she isn't there. At the last moment he decides to get on the train and use the ticket himself. A spontaneous decision by a man who's never been spontaneous in his life.

In Lisbon he decides to track down the author. He soon finds out that he died 30 years ago, but that doesn't stop his interest in him. He speaks to his friends and his relatives, and he finds out that he was a member of the resistance during the Salazar dictatorship in the late 1960's. He discovers a series of intrigues and deceptions in the resistance that the surviving members are unwilling to talk about.

Even though the story is enthralling, I have to question its realism. Would any man, spontaneous or not, give up his job to search for the author of a book that belongs to someone he's just met? There doesn't seem to be any logic in what he did. Still, there are fine performances by Jeremy Irons as Dr. Gregorius and Martina Gedeck as the optometrist who assists him in his search. Bruno Ganz plays a small role as a former resistance member, and Christopher Lee is the priest who educated Amadeu in his Catholic school.

The film is almost a love story. Almost. Dr. Gregorius feels attracted to the beautiful optometrist who replaces his broken glasses, but he's not spontaneous enough to fall in love in a foreign country. Giving up his job in the middle of a lesson has exhausted his supply of spontaneity for years to come. He ought to let himself go. Nothing is as important as love.

	Order from Amazon.com
	Order from Amazon.co.uk
	Order from Amazon.de