Only a couple of years after the scary documentary 'Arrivee d'un train', and the cinema's gone all Freudian on us. The camera watches as a train emerges from a tunnel, towards which it then moves, placed as it is on the engine. This documentary shot cuts to a flagrantly artificial set, as a bourgeois couple sit among their many purchases, on their way home after a day's shopping.
In public (out shopping) and in private (at home) they must keep up a rigid, Victorian, bourgeois facade. In a train, though, in a dark tunnel, they are allowed brief liberty, as the husband kisses a protesting, though not unwilling wife, before propriety returns with the tunnelless daylight. This film is given extra frisson by the knowledge that the couple are played by the director and his wife.
This kind of equation of trains with sex would become a cliche, most wittily used by Hitchcock in films like 'The 39 Steps', 'The Lady Vanishes' and 'North by Northwest'. Where this film scores is in its paradoxical awareness - the natural desires of a married couple find expression in an 'artificial' setting, which expresses a truer reality; while the repressive, artificial world of codes, strictures and taboos are equated with the 'natural', when, of course, they are anything but.
The film also links the train, the cinema and sex, the idea of being in the dark and letting your fantasies take off away from society; the difference between public and private blurred by new technologies.
