Saturday, May 01, 2010

Train de Vie

I've never seen the movie, but I love Klezmer music, Roma music, Transylvania, and Holocaust escape stories, so this has got it all. The plot of Train of Life is contrived-heroic. Which is fine with me. These gypsies and Jews are escaping the Holocaust by disguising some of themselves as Nazis and sending a death train in the opposite direction - to Palestine.



The Roma women are a bit exaggerated - well there's a surprise in a movie - as that much cleavage and comfort with outsiders are both unlikely, but it's reasonably in culture. Gypsies consider the bottom half of the body unclean and so rigorously covered while the top half is clean, and so exposed rather freely. This has become less true in the 20th C. It is the law of Marime, purity. To Gadzo eyes they seem flaunting and immodest. Which of course no one making a movie they hope to distribute widely could pass up.

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