Please don't spend money on this.

not as good as all the hype

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This movie is a comedy, no doubt about it: is has comic stereotypes. It's romanced. I laughed. But this film also has epic dimensions, even if they are imaginary. Over the millenia, we are the witnesses of a new Exodus. God leads His people out of harm's way once again. Moses is now a young lunatic, but in his madness he is wiser than all others. The fate of the Jews links at one point with that of the Gypsies. It had to: both are known in history for their thirst for freedom, both had their Exodus(from Egypt to Canaan; from India to the far corners of Europe), both died heavily in the Nazi concentration camps. For all of them who died in the death-camps, this movie is a prison break: it is their share of freedom post-mortem given. They deserved to escape and to reach the Promised Land, but history allows this only in our imagination: they died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and in many other. Everyone has the right to try to reach a Promised Land, or a Moby Dick to hunt, or a Holy Grail to find: because they were denied such rights in reality, this imaginary Exodus brings justice even if it's late. This is the main idea of the film: justice for the innocents.

Despite a really annoying audience of noisy senior citizens I got into the spirit of "Train of Life (Train de vie)" (though it was odd having the shtetl residents in a foreign-language film speak French until I realized of course in "Jakob the Liar" Robin Williams and Liev Schreiber speak English so why not in a Belgian/Romanian-produced movie wouldn't they speak French?).It has the immediate feel of the magic realism of "The Milagro Beanfields War" and it no more cheapens the Holocaust than "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" cheapens the Civil War. It is full of the warmth and love of everyday life and personalities come sweetly to life.I thought the Fool as the Seer was getting a bit much until it's made clear he's not really the Village Idiot so no heavy-handed symbolism.(originally written 11/14/1999)

Unartistic/mainstream, unfunny, pointless. This film has more in common with standard modern Hollywood than French filmmaking; over-structured and over-timed, and lack of atmosphere, emotions and charm. The cinematography is mediocre; ok but nothing to be impressed about. It has some interesting twists, like Jews becoming Nazis and communists, and, perhaps, a hidden irony over those ideologies. It's not getting anywhere though. It's not an art film and I wouldn't recommend it for family entertainment either. Overall, it's decent, but not worth seeing in my opinion considering the supply of other movies.2/5

It's amazing how many people seem to be complaining about the unrealism of this film. Given that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that the film is not trying to be realistic from scene 1 onwards, the question is not whether the film tried to be realistic and failed, but whether a film about the Holocaust must try to be realistic to be any good.The trouble is that unless as part of the performance the entire audience is deported in cattle-trucks, slowly starved, and then gassed, it is rather difficult to see how any film can be realistic about the Holocaust. So, if there are to be movies about the Holocaust at all, or if they are to do much beyond telling us that the Holocaust was ghastly (we knew that, didn't we?)they have to give up on trying to be realistic, and try to look at the Holocaust in an indirect way. This is where I think "Train de Vie" succeeds, for example by the deliberate parallels between the society inside the train, and the society that helped caused the Holocaust. I could list them at length, but if you've seen the movie and didn't notice them, you won't be convinced by anything I say, and if you haven't seen the movie, I'd rather leave you the pleasure of discovering them for yourself.I never actually thought of the film's relation to "Life is Beautiful" until reading the IMDB comments, after I'd seen both films. Well it's very hard to compare the two films, but I don't think "Train de Vie" needs to be ashamed of the comparison. True, Roberto Benigni does not star in it, and that is a heavy handicap for any film. On the other hand I think I like the exuberant un-reality of "Train de Vie" better. After all the portrayal of the Holocaust in "Life is Beautiful" is just as unrealistic as that of "Train de Vie"; the only difference is that "Train de Vie" revels from the first sceneto the last in its unreality. If we must be unreal, let us at least enjoy it.