Sud Express

Six stories - subtly linked together by excellent editing and by the Sud Express, the express train from Paris to Lisbon - together form a far-from-sentimental yet heartwarming mosaic about loneliness and the quest for love in our not-very-united States of Europe, where immigration and the loss of traditional social structures lead to instability and unrest. The fact that the makers originally planned to make a documentary on the subject is tangible in many respects. They worked with a largely non-professional cast and have managed to avoid the air of political correctness that surrounds this subject. At the Paris station Austerlitz, the bitter racist taxi driver Samuel picks up a customer. His wife Lucia says she is going to stay with a girlfriend for a few days. However, she turns up in a very different place: near a small Portuguese village where two elderly brothers live together and have not spoken a word to each other in the last five years. In Lisbon, a young Angolan who sells fake Rolex watches decides to travel to France, fascinated as he is by the theme park Futuroscope. The Spanish stories are set around Salamanca, where a idealist girl and her handicapped boyfriend organise a campaign to collect signatures opposing the wheelchair-unfriendly train; a landowner goes hunting with his 4WD and a North African immigrant wants to visit his French girlfriend. (GT)