"Prends garde à la douceur des choses." Beware the sweetness of things. So says Jean Rocheforte's Manesquier, a retired poetry teacher eking out his days in the large house left him by his mother. It's a line from a poem by Jean-Paul Toulet, a poem he is keen to teach to his young pupil, but his young pupil cannot discern what makes the line so strange and so beautiful. Milan, an aging hoodlum played by Johnny Hallyday, spies through a gap in the doorway and sees what the child misses: beware the sweetness of things, because sweetness can trap you.
L'Homme du Train focuses on the relationship between these two - both are killing time (Manesquier prior to major surgery, Milan waiting to rob the local bank) and both of them see something in the other they would wish for themselves (a wish that manifests itself with Milan adopting Manesquier's pipe and slippers, and Manesquier pretending to be Wyatt Earp).
Despite appearances - appearances that may suggest L'Homme du Train is a western (you see it in the way Milan exits the train in the opening minutes of the movie, you see it in the way Manesquier pretends to be Wyatt Earp), appearances that may suggest L'Homme du Train is a comedy (a beautiful screenplay by Claude Klotz sees rich comic interplay between Manesquier and Milan) - despite all of these appearances, L'Homme du Train is a film very much concerned with sweetness: the sober sweetness that age has for youth, for the life that has passed by (crucially, Manesquier talks of life more dominated by whether than when).
Dominated by a bravura performance that snagged Hallyday the Prix Jean Gabin, L'Homme du Train is charming if slight, with the easy, mannered pace of a good book and the reassuring warmth of a blazing fire.
A teacher and a gangster meet at a deserted station. They realise that they might have been better following the other's way of life, and a kind of friendship develops. The two leads are perfectly complemented with Rochefort as ever, marvellous.
