On the occasion of the Christmas holidays, young Lisa is preparing to leave Germany, where she is studying, to return home to her parents in Verona. With her is Margaret, her peer and friend, with whom she shared her time abroad. The girls opt to travel by train, while at home Lisa's father is finishing his doctor's day so that he and his wife can devote themselves to choosing the first moped to give their daughter.
Meanwhile, the two young people's journey begins to prove uncomfortable. Forced to the standing seat, Lisa and Margaret encounter two ticketless thugs on the run from the police. At first they help them escape the conductor, then given the strange development of events-one of the thugs pays, correspondingly, sexual attentions in the toilet to an unsuspected upper-class lady-they distance themselves from him. But the trouble doesn't end there: the train at one point stops for a special inspection, in fact there is talk of the presence of a bomb...without losing heart, the girls fall back on the Innsbruck-Verona train, an alternative solution to get to their destination a little earlier. They are not the only ones to take that train, however: they realize it when they hear the sound of the harmonica playing by one of the ugly mugs...
It must be said right away, this is a film with strong tints. Not only and not so much because of the scenes of actual violence shown and not spared to the viewer, but rather because of a context, a situation, and psychological notations that make the film anything but negligible. Lado has created, with his train leaving for Italy, a microcosm of society divided into compartments and carefully spied on. What is disturbing is that, from that train (thus from that/this society), there leaks a sense of repression, hypocrisy, repressed brutality and ready to overwhelm the occasional weakling in order to feed off it and increase its own strength. That Train is, according to its creator's own intentions, a fresco of a power based on violence as a form of covert thought even before action. Every character who takes that train is thus an active representative of this regime, whether rhetorician like the Catholic pundit or seemingly stalwart representative of the stronghold of traditional values, like the icy woman in a suit beautifully played by Macha Meril (''Deep Red'), intent in her private life on collecting pornographic photos and indulging in the brutality of an occasional intercourse with an unknown ruffian. And the latter, the bawd, what is he if not the material executor of this violent regime, the one who, with the tacit connivance of the 'masters', can shamelessly put into practice its sadistic and perverse attitude...a microcosm, we said. A vehicle that bears the insignia of a screaming world, of screaming years.
Here, then, this film presents a dual reading. It can be seen as the most successful example of the 'rape&revenge' strand, rape and revenge, a visually extreme film that twists and turns the knife in the wound of a cinematic strand that, while boasting illustrious precedents (think of the seminal 'Straw Dog' with a capital Dustin Hoffman, 1971) and evidence winking to the extreme while not sacrificing tonal lightenings (Wes Craven's historically important but stylistically awkward 'The Last House on the Left,' 1972) lacked a film-manifesto in which everything was excessive, absolute, 'unbearable.' Yes, as unbearable as Flavio Bucci's animalistic grin, as the truculent and idiotic gaze of his sidekick Gianfranco De Grassi, as the vile and morbid behavior of the self-righteous 'voyeur' Franco Fabrizi. Of Meril I have already said, it is necessary instead to complete the cast picture with Enrico Maria Salerno, Lisa's father, embodying a model of the simple-minded bourgeois who at the Christmas dinner speaks laconically about youthful violence.
The second reading that deserves to be given is instead more implicit and elusive: the film is, in its fully consummated violence, a theoretical reflection even before it is carnal. A parable, if you will, bitterly on how certain 'healthy bearers' of deviations - and here Lado acutely hints that not only sexual deviations we are talking about, but also political, religious, more generically behavioral ones - manage to exercise 'evil,' delegating its implementation to others, certainly, but remaining its purest authors and assertors.
So what is violence, Lado asks: violence is both a means and an end, and anyone who does not actively combat it, even if in good faith, becomes complicit in the exercise of this brutality, risking even ending up as its victim.
There is no salvation in the train or outside of it: the only form of justice seems to be constituted by lack of mercy, deception and revenge. It is because of all this that 'The Last Train of the Night' remains to this day imbued with a mocking cynicism that cannot fail to shake energetically, if not violently, the minds of viewers too addicted to formal cinematic horror. In this film, horror is sociological, conceptual and physical at the same time, coming to stab our eyes without relenting, without hesitation and with enormous merit: disturbing our consciences, even 34 years after it came to light.
Review by venus in furs
