This may just be a film about roleplaying, but it's some serious work.Three people sit on a train and narrate a movie they want to make, inspired by events around them and another passenger, as well as collaborating and figuring out the details of the narrative as it occurs. Obviously, as the narrative unfolds, things go uber-meta as scenes are acted out later to be thrown away, plot holes are directly pointed out within the narration, and of course as meta always goes within the story within the story are other stories told.However, Robbe-Grillet is not just being silly. The main character's paranoia and distrust runs towards the brink as the movie goes along and every action turns out to be a test, or misdirection, or false plot device. He cannot keep his own role straight, meaning he falls into every trap the mysterious coke dealers set for him as well as gives away everything to a police officer, he cannot remove himself enough emotionally from the mindgames that his roleplaying with the femme fatale comes to a fatal end, and the running train and close-ups on faces punctuating the story show his anxiety and mental breakdown as it seems his fate is, truly, in the hands of flippant writers and outside forces that don't let a man go about minding his own business.Similarly, the focus on bondage is juxtaposed by Robbe-Grillet's almost abject inversion of The Gaze. The Gaze is the term for undercurrent of male-dominated perspective in cinema, as women are treated by the camera as objects to "gaze" at whereas men are typically the ones "gazing". This would seem to be the case here what with the main character's pornography magazine, his roleplaying of rape, and the finale in which that obscure object of desire literally ends up in chains. However, this same protagonist finds himself uneasily the subject of the gaze itself as women, passersby, and the writers continually stare at him with mocking and seductive expressions. The woman he sleeps with herself is in more control of everything going on than he is, and unable to handle that control, he eventually kills her. By the end, he cannot look at a woman without feeling implicated into something, and paranoia sets in.This theme finds its final punctuation in the final scene when the writers brush off their own storytelling as a decent enough yarn, only really interesting simply because it's not real life. Real life then finds the protagonist and the femme fatale as everyday lovers--but their grinning embrace directly into the eye of the camera implicates the audience, because we were not there to see them have a nice day and go about their lives happily ever after, we were there to see them in bondage and self-destruction, and were entertained by those notions.--PolarisDiB

Robbe-Grillet's most overtly playful movie, with a narrative that doubly doubles back on itself. A writer (played by Robbe-Grillet himself), his assistant (Catherine, his wife), and a producer board the Trans-Europ Express for Antwerp. The producer asks the writer to formulate a screenplay based on their present situation. Jean-Louis Trintignant, seen in a prologue buying L'Express, then stealing another magazine with pictures of women in bondage poses, enters their compartment, looks furtively at the trio, and leaves. They "recognize" him as the actor Trintignant, and the writer begins to compose his story, with Trintignant as the protagonist, of a smuggler running drugs into Belgium. The film we see is that story, with occasional interruptions by the assistant or the producer commenting on the story ("But that's absurd!" "Well, we'll cut that scene then"). The smuggler follows clues for a complicated drop-off, and dallies with a prostitute (the lovely Marie-France Pisier), in a typical Robbe-Grillet scene of consensual rape and bondage. Then the whole drug delivery set-up is revealed as a dry run for the novice smuggler, who must then re-embark on the same journey, with different results.Robbe-Grillet's fantasies of erotic violence and bondage culminate in this film with a night-club act, in which a young woman, kneeling with one leg extended behind her, on a revolving table, is stripped and chained, in slow close-ups, making voyeurs of the movie audience as well as the night-club patrons.The story ends as our trio arrives in Antwerp, with a surprise final freeze frame of "Trintignant" being greeted by "Pisier". An entertaining diversion on storytelling. Robbe-Grillet may just be the "anti-Godard"; his films (of which I've now seen four) are demonstrations of cinema as "un-truth" at 24 frames per second.

Given that TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS is the only movie directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet which the late conservative British film critic Leslie Halliwell reviewed in his celebrated “Film Guide”, one would think that it was more accessible than his usual reportedly impenetrable stuff and, in a way, it is – but still, the end result is hardly straightforward and almost as cerebral! Jean-Louis Trintignant, in the first of four films he made with Robbe-Grillet, plays a novice drug courier tested by his future employers in carrying a stash of cocaine (which is actually sugar) by train and depositing it into a train station locker – but this simple task is fraught with any number of unexpected complications including police interrogation and night-time chases. Marie-France Pisier is a very beguiling presence here as a whore/double agent with whom Trintignant has several S&M encounters in a hotel room until her ‘double face’ drives him to murder…or does it? Although I was aware that the actress had played Colette in Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series and had the leading role in the trashy THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT (1977), looking at her filmography just now I was surprised to learn that she was also in one of my favorite films, Luis Bunuel’s THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (1974), as well as Jacques Rivette’s ambitious fantasy CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (1974; which I’ve just acquired via the BFI’s 2-Disc edition)! What this film has that the other Robbe-Grillet titles I’ve watched (including THE IMMORTAL ONE [1963]) don’t, is a surprisingly substantial dose of humor: in fact, the writer-director himself appears as a train passenger who is contemplating a film about drug-trafficking which (given that he happens to be on the train himself) would be an ideal vehicle for Jean-Louis Trintignant!; similarly, when Trintignant and Pisier go to a café he tells her that the waiter who had just served them was not a waiter at all but an actor playing a waiter!; during one of the various meetings with his shady employers, Trintignant is asked to repeat where he is supposed to meet his contact – implying a very complicated route – he simply replies “Where” (at which his employer doesn’t even bat an eyelid!), etc. At one point, Robbe-Grillet’s fellow passengers complain that drug-trafficking is no longer hip and that diamond-smuggling is the current criminal fad; therefore, Trintignant & Co. exchange costumes and settings accordingly…before the director decides to stick to his original idea (whim?) after all! Incidentally, this ‘screenplay-in-the-making’ structure reminds one of the contemporaneous Hollywood comedy, Paris WHEN IT SIZZLES (1964), which was itself a remake of an earlier French original – Julien Duvivier’s LA FETE A' HENRIETTE (1952). In fact, the whole self-referential element in the film and its heady spoof on the thriller genre recalls the Jean-Luc Godard of BREATHLESS (1960), BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), ALPHAVILLE (1965) and PIERROT LE FOU (1965) more than anything else...Unfortunately, what I said about the poor video quality of EDEN AND AFTER (1970) applies to an even greater extent here – since this one looked distinctly like a tenth-generation dupe (with actors’ features being quite blurred at times and especially, alas, during the S&M striptease act towards the end). That said, the film itself is let down somewhat by sluggish pacing – even if the version I watched ran for a mere 88 minutes, when all sources I know of give its running-time as 105! As it is, I’d welcome a legitimate DVD release of TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS and one hopes that the recent passing of its creator will inspire adventurous labels to pursue its rights.

This film is a beautifully done story within a story --- film within a film. The author and friends take a train ride and begin to work out a film; its plot, its characters and their actions. As the story evolves the characters take on their own existence, reality becomes inverted; they weave their own story as author becomes audience.It is a taste of the 1960's thinking of the Michael Caine foreign intrigue films, The Orient Express not to mention the Manchurian Candidate. In a way it thumbs its nose at the genre.I saw it when it ran almost forty years ago and enjoyed it immensely. If you can find it --- check it out.