Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I know very little about this movie but I saw that it’s a series of interacting vignettes and a mix of drama and comedy, so I’ll give it a try. It seems to have something to do with the interactions between passengers on a train so it should be interesting.

After watching the movie:

On one night in Memphis, three groups of foreigners pass through the rundown Arcade Hotel. Mitsuko and Jun from Yokohama are passing through on a rock and roll pilgrimage, Luisa is stuck on a layover while bringing her husband’s coffin back to Italy, and Johnny, an Englishman, has a drunken, armed breakdown after being laid off and his friends take him somewhere to cool down and lay low.

I spent the entire movie wondering why this is called “Mystery Train”, since it seemed that the only mystery was why it was called that. After all, we only see the train at the beginning when Mitsuko and Jun get off and at the end when they and Dee Dee get on it the next day. Luisa didn’t even arrive by train, she came into and out of town by plane. It was only during the credits that I realized that it’s named for the Elvis song that’s played multiple times through the movie, so it’s another case of forcing a famous song title into service as a movie title.

These pieces don’t feel so much like complete stories as portraits of moments. They gesture vaguely in the direction of resolutions, but nothing is satisfactorily resolved. Mitsuko and Jun are going through a bitter patch in their relationship, but they make up a bit, only to resume bickering the next morning. The ghost of Elvis appears to Luisa and they’re just both confused. Johnny and his friends speed out of town thinking they’re running from the police but if anything their relationships are more broken than they were at the beginning.

I guess there’s a low key kind of comedy to Johnny’s segment, but really the most comedic the movie gets is with the cutaways back to the bellhop and the night clerk who bosses him around. Everything is very low key and underplayed, except for their interactions. Sometimes comedic bits feel like comedy and sometimes they feel like comic relief if I notice them at all, and I’m beginning to think this movie falls into the latter.

This was absolutely nothing like what the title and synopsis I saw made me imagine. And that probably contributed to how frustrating it was, but I also just find it frustrating that none of the stories seem to resolve properly. I could have been much better prepared for what this movie is, but I lay most of the blame on the unfitting title. This is like a less violent, less stylized, less overhyped Pulp Fiction, but I wanted it to be a spoof of Murder on the Orient Express. How much of that is my fault, and how much is the fault of forcing titles where they don’t belong?