To travel without leaving your sofa, board the best cinema trains

It is the arrival of a train entering La Ciota station, filmed by Louis Lumière in 1895, which constitutes one of the very first shots of cinema and will outline the contours of what will become the seventh art. The most expensive scene in silent film history is also that of a train wreck in TheGeneral by Buster Keaton, in 1926, filmed in a single take with a real locomotive. First proof, if necessary, that the train is inseparable from the cinema.

We have seen train stations all over the world on the big screen, whether they are crowded or deserted, whether the characters flee there or – more often – find themselves there. Thus, the station, a place of intersection, is a high sentimental place in the cinema, whether it is the scene of heartbreaking farewells, as in Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Call Me by Your Name, or passionate reunions, as in A man and a woman and The party.

But one can also kill there, as in The Incorruptibles Where Nikitaor even dance there, as in Slumdog Millionaire Where Sex with friends. Sometimes the train station can even transform the film, as in Chance by Krzysztof Kieślowski, where the main character sees his destiny change according to a train he misses or catches.

Conducive to passenger daydreaming, train travel is also highly cinematic. With the summer holidays approaching, we wanted to classify, subjectively, the best movie scenes aboard a train. Whether the action is entirely on the rails or the trip is temporary, here are the ones that rocked us or made us laugh, travel or dream. Beware of the automatic closing of the doors, watch out for departure!

A journey within a journey, the one-way train towards the “bottom of the lake” station that little Chihiro takes is the most poetic of all cinema trains. Accompanied by the hamster, the fly and the Faceless victim of the witch Yubaba, surrounded by ghostly, sad and absent workers but lulled by the piano of Joe Hisaishi, she seems to fly over the sea while landscapes worthy of a romantic painting pass by. .

Inside this wagon, object of our daily life, the story finds a little realism and it is in this train with no possible return that she took alone that Chihiro’s journey ends. She has grown up and, contemplative, she fixes the horizon, a symbol of the future. Through this famous train scene, Hayao Miyazaki offers the viewer a moment of delicate poetry that soothes the lively rhythm of his story and suspends time for three minutes of pure melancholy.

A pillar of French comedy, the second film by the Toledano and Nakache tandem opens at Gare Montparnasse in Paris. In a railway sequence of pure delight, the directors laid the foundations of their story. In turn, the small and big protagonists of the film are introduced to us and it is through this old Intercity that their main personality traits, on which the comedy of the film will be built, are sketched. Anxious parents, overexcited children and overwhelmed animators, we already laugh a lot.

While reminiscing on our microphone about their filming memories, Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache declared that in the cinema, “trains, children and animals are the hardest to film”. In our happy daysthey ticked two boxes out of three, to our delight.

It is a train journey to Vienna that will be the scene of love at first sight between Céline and Jesse in the first part of this romantic trilogy in real time, which has become as precious as it is timeless. A supposedly ephemeral romantic encounter that gave pride of place to words in dialogues on life, death and love, sometimes deep, often innocent, written by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the prime of their twenties.

Before trilogy: memory of a trip in good company

The first part of this river film was shot day by day and in chronological order, each weekend being devoted to working on the script for the following week. In the end, twenty-five days, 2.5 million budget and many round trips between Vienna and Salzburg will be enough to put in a can this work of youth, on the ideals and the questions inherent in this very particular period.

“It’s not where you go that matters when you run away, but where you leave from.” It is while meditating on this quote and to the sound of “Voyage voyage” by Desireless that Laura, a young Finnish girl, will board a train heading for the Murmansk region in Russia, for an icy road trip. The journey in the company of his fellow car mate, a young man given to alcohol and questionable hygiene, promises to be long and uncomfortable. But, as their journey progresses, their relationship will calm down and will go where it is not expected.

5 reasons to board Compartment 6

From Moscow to Saint-Petersburg, from their discussions to their one-on-one dinners in a car-bar which has more charm than those of our Ouigos, the exchanges between these protagonists who are in total opposition illustrate how travel opens our minds. . Even on board a very small cracra compartment, dreamers will find their account.

Certainly not the best of Wes Anderson, but a new compartmentalized family intrigue after the hotel of The Tenenbaum Family and the boat aquatic life, where travel and change of scenery are also on the agenda. Respecting the well-known meticulousness of the director, the train which welcomes the Whitman siblings, dislocated and on a spiritual quest, is a real reconstructed train which, for the purposes of filming, circulated for the most part in the desert of Rajasthan, excluding studio shooting. despite all the logistical difficulties inherent in such an exercise.

From the train combining Indian style and the luxury of an Orient-Express – where everything has been done by hand in the purest Indian tradition – to the luggage of the three brothers designed by Marc Jacobs, the trip aboard the Darjeeling Limited straight from the overflowing imagination of Wes Anderson is a feast for the eyes.

We could continue the list of legendary cinema trains ad infinitum – from Hogwarts Express to Express Polefrom Snowpiercer to Last train to Busan, of the metaphorical train of Death on the heels to the ingeniously filmed one ofUnbreakable –, but we also have a train to catch!