PULLMAN PARADIS
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1995
99 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM

A cross-section of tourists, Parisians and daytrippers board a Pullman bus on a 48-hour journey to Normandy; along the way they all become friends (or enemies) and fall prey to a mass burglary. A multi-character dramedy in the vein of Robert Altman, PULLMAN PARADIS again affords Rosier an opportunity to expose the contradictions (and the comedy) of postwar French society, without casting her participants into facile molds of good and evil. The result is a warmly compassionate, drolly hilarious depiction of multiple anxieties (class, race, etc) crisscrossing at once – and a revealing ensemble portrait.

“Traveling is not just going places, but meeting people, remarks a character in Michèle Rosier’s refreshing human comedy. The actors (who hail from the stage) make up a troupe that revels in repartee — it may not be Musset, but Rosier, who made a movie on George Sand, has a sense for sharp dialogue and the subtle pacts that spring up between strangers. So a kind of spell is cast on these mere mortals, shaken from their moorings, who quit their banality and take off from the big bus into another space, outward bound.” – Janet Dupont, The New York Times