Cinema: Trcms-Europ Express

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France's Alain Robbe-Grillet believes in the cult of impersonality. The "new novel," with which he made large literary waves during the '50s, said goodbye to psychology and presented people and their actions as reflected in surface appearances and objective happenings. In 1961 he wrote the haunting, memorable Last Year at Marienbad, a movie in which it was marvelously impossible to tell who (if anyone) was doing what (if anything) to whom, let alone why.

Trans-Europ Express is a spoof of the spoof-suspense films presented in the Robbe-Grillet manner—which is to say that plot, character and motivation are kept at considerably more than arm's length. Strictly speaking, there are no characters at all, except Author-Director Robbe-Grillet, Producer Samy Helfon and a female assistant, played by Robbe-Grillet's wife Catherine. These three gather in a compartment of the Trans-Europ Express en route from Paris to Antwerp.

"This train is terrific," says Robbe-Grillet. "Maybe we ought to do a film about it." They proceed to rough out the beginnings of a plot into the girl's handy tape recorder while the express rattles along. Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (A Man and a Woman) happens to be on board, and they decide that he is Elias, a dope runner on his first job for a big syndicate. Whereupon the camera picks up Trintignant sneaking furtively around the station, exchanging recognition signals and suitcases with sinister strangers and extracting a pistol from a hollowed-out book.

As the stock shenanigans pile up, the film shifts back to Robbe-Grillet and Helfon, who discuss whether to have Elias smuggling diamonds instead of dope. Eventually, they decide to forget about an agent who has just gone through Elias' luggage, and generally continue to improvise scene after scene.

So the story develops by fits and false starts—filled with cutbacks, recapitulations, inconsistencies, and broad parodies of such moviemakers as Hitchcock and Godard. Spoofy sex is provided by toothsome Marie-France Pisier as a double-agent prostitute, plus the deadpan hero's fatal fetish for naked girls locked up in chains. There is some excellent photography and a surprise-on-surprise ending that confuses even Robbe-Grillet.

There is fun, in fact, for everyone, except those who like real thrills in their thrillers.