European Films

Urban intersecting stories are quickly becoming a staple of contemporary cinema (especially American cinema where recent successful examples include Crash and 21 Grams) but leave it to the Europeans to come up with an interesting new variety: stories connected through a railway line. The Sud Express of the title is a train that travels between Paris and Lisbon passing through Basque country and Salamanca in Spain, connecting rich and poor, fans and opponents of the train.

In a typical twist, co-writers and directors Chema de la Peña and Gabriel Velázquez (both from Salamanca) have crafted a film whose pacing resembles a train journey itself: slow as it starts out of the station and gradually picking up speed as the voyage progresses. The way in which the characters are shot, however, more closely resembles watching a train pass by from the outside: the camera remains fixed as people move in and out of the frame. Even the editing is in synch with this idea of a film as a train, offering staccato edits ("jump cuts") of the same view with several seconds cut out in between, giving the subjects a jumpy quality that mimics the feeling of sitting in a train that passes over the welded joints of the rails. The film itself is in fact concerned very little with the interior of the Sud Express, instead focussing on people who live in the areas where the train passes.

A Parisian taxi driver knows why the Sud Express is always late: "It’s from the South". Despite having a Portuguese wife, his overtly racist remarks would make the complete cast of Crash cringe. To teach him a lesson (or perhaps because she was simply bored with him), his wife has taken the Sud Express to finally meet a former lover from Portugal with whom she had lost contact. A petty thief from Lisbon is inspired by a stolen magazine to visit the Futuroscope Park in France, whilst a couple of Spanish friends try to collect autographs from the villagers to have the train re-routed. An immigrant worker from Basque country thinks he has finally saved enough to make a surprise visit to his girlfriend living in France. The stories are only vaguely related to one another, though the kaleidoscopic look at life in France and on the Iberian Peninsula is cohesive enough to make for a single coherent film, despite a somewhat slow start.

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