French stage giant Patrice Chéreau's last film, Queen Margot, found him adapting Dumas' Byzantine novel of 16th-century royal intrigue. His latest, Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train, was bound to be more modest in scope, but Chéreau never treats it as such, and the results are marvelous. A triumph of emotional intensity and sustained mood, Train follows the funeral party of a minor painter (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) from Paris to its final destination in Limoges, his birthplace and the site of France's largest cemetery. While sharing the funeral-bound train and later at Trintignant's childhood home, friends, relatives, hangers-on, lovers, and admirers meet, reunite, fall in and out of love, and fight. An unofficial father figure to them all, Trintignant, whose life is revealed in passing details when it's revealed at all, has left them to sort things out for themselves, a task they seem unprepared to undertake. Though the film is sometimes maddeningly intricate, it becomes apparent early on that Chéreau has plans to work on a level more direct than narrative. When the train pulls alongside the beat-up station wagon carrying the casket, Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" cuts in, the first of an eclectic assortment of songs to do so, muting the film's virtually non-stop dialogue but making a point of its own: Who these people are and the specifics of their grief may not be immediately apparent, but Chéreau makes their tremendous sense of loss palpable. That the director prefers feeling over plot doesn't make his mourners—many of them gay, like the deceased—any less interesting, particularly the touchingly rendered and well-played dissolution of a long-term affair between Pascal Greggory and Bruno Todeschini, both of whom have unwittingly taken the same HIV-positive lover (Sylvain Jacques). Silent in flashbacks as the painter, Trintignant also appears as his twin brother, a melancholy shoe merchant who strikes up an unexpected, yet-to-be-defined friendship with Vincent Pérez, a pre-operative transsexual who anxiously and dramatically anticipates the next step. With rough elegance, Chéreau's camerawork (widescreen, fluid, and largely handheld) underscores his characters' interior lives, a task at which it succeeds far better than it does at capturing their exterior lives. But, again, that doesn't seem to be the point, and if it were, the film would merely be a beautiful failure. It's content instead to create a dark, memorable symphony of loss, struggle, and, for some at least, newfound resolution.