Night Train to Lisbon (2013)

One rainy morning in Bern, Switzerland, Raimund Gregorius (Jeremy Irons) was rushing to work when he spotted a young woman about to jump off a bridge.  He tackled her, preventing her from suicide, and then escorted her to his classroom.  She sat in the room briefly before fleeing.  Raimund saw that she had left her coat.  He grabbed it and went to find her; she was gone.  He checked the bridge but did not see her body in the river below.  He found a book in her coat and began reading it.  There was a train ticket enclosed.  On the spur of the moment, he went to the train station and took that train to Lisbon.

In Lisbon, Raimund sought the author of the book, a man named Amadeu Prado.  It turned out that he had died in 1974.  Raimund set about interviewing those who knew him and, in the process, discovering Amadeu's role in fighting the Salazar Regime.

This is a story told out of order.  Each person offers a part of the story that may come before, after, or coincident with parts already revealed.  All of this is in flashback.  As such, each part is played by two actors, the young one and the old one.  No aging makeup here.  He chatted with Amadeu's sister (Charlotte Rampling), his priest (Christopher Lee), Joao from the Resistance, his best friend Jorge, and the mystery woman, Estefania (Lena Olin).  If he took notes, he could write a biography.  Would it have been easier to just tell the story of Amadeu without this framing of Raimund's awkward investigation?  Maybe.  Then again, by framing it this way, we see the contrast between their fiery youth and their sunset years, providing an opportunity to explore the long-term impact of their actions.

I had started the book in 2019.  I was traveling to Portugal that summer.  The book did not hold me.  I put it down after 100 pages or so and never picked it up again.  Seeing the movie, I'm not suddenly interested in finishing the book.

The movie is just okay.

300 Days of Sun

Joanna "Jo" Millard has lost her job and escaped her long-term relationship.  She has come to Portugal to learn Portuguese with vague plans for rebooting her career as a journalist.  While taking language classes in Faro, she meets Nathan Emberlin.  Nathan is a lively young fellow who asks her advice for finding people.  He wants to find a family friend.  Jo makes some inquiries and soon meets Ian, an English Expat who urges her to read a 1953 book that is a thinly disguised autobiography of the author.  The book tells the tale of a woman who escaped Paris and took refuge with her husband in Lisbon.  The book switches from the first person account of Jo in the present to the 3rd person account of Alva Barton in the 1940s.

 

The book never decides what it is.  Is it a mystery, a thriller, a historical fiction novel, a romance, a travelogue?  It is a mixture of all of the above.  If one had to pick the central theme, the issue that most needs resolution, it would be child abduction.  The prologue opens in the late 1940s with Alva searching desperately for her son on a beach.  Has he been taken?  Nathan believes that he was abducted in the early 1990s and enlists Jo to help him dig up the story.  Clearly, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007 is inspiration for some of the story.  It is initially proposed that lots of kids have vanished from the Algarve region but the book doesn't pursue that beyond Nathan.  There is a villain who doesn't appear until the end of the third act and is easily overcome.  He was never a real threat, just a boogeyman to provide some tension for Jo and Nathan.

 

It is an easy read and keeps one's interest but the conclusion is a letdown.  Worse, it provides a couple pages where Jo tells how her relationship with Nathan finally ended and that she still has doubts about whether he found his real parents or not.  They lived ambivalently ever after.  Meh.

 

The author's note discusses how she had gone on a junket to Portugal in the 80s and told her various hosts and guides that she would write a glowing piece.  At the time, she only managed to get a few paragraphs published and felt a bit guilty.  So, this book is an apology?  An effort to write the promised piece several decades later?  As with the ambivalent epilogue, this author's note could have been nixed.