The rich latte of Jeremy Irons’s speaking voice lends flavour to this telenovela-like Euro-pudding directed with slow-moving solemnity by Bille August. Irons plays Raimundo, a bespectacled teacher in Bern, who saves a young woman from taking her own life: she runs away, leaving behind her coat, in which there is a fascinating book by a Portuguese doctor and a rail ticket to Lisbon. Raimundo is entranced by the mystery, jumps aboard the train and with implausible speed – the story appears to predate the web – tracks down the author’s surviving relatives and associates: a stately range of performances from Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Ganz and Christopher Lee. He finds himself swept into a romantic flashback maelstrom: the story of how they all were caught up in the fascist oppression in the 70s. Irons’s impulsive rail journey is a weird (if sexless) version of his performance in Louis Malle’s Damage or indeed his similarly preposterous globetrotting in Claude Lelouch’s cult clunker And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen. Irons has a soft spot for these hokey dramas, and I admit I have a soft spot for his appearances in them. On TV, this might while away a rainy Sunday afternoon.
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