Movies

Night Train to Lisbon

Director Bille August (“Pelle the Conqueror”) gives his film of Pascal Mercier’s novel a promising beginning. Jeremy Irons’ schoolmaster, walking the grand stone streets of Bern, Switzerland, during a torrential rainstorm, saves a young woman who is about to jump off a bridge. He takes her to his classroom, but she promptly vanishes, leaving behind an old book with a train ticket to Lisbon tucked inside.

The book was written in the 1970s by Amadeu de Prado, a young aristocrat played in flashback by Jack Huston as one big package of earnest perfection. Amadeu was part of the resistance against Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira ­Salazar.

Mystifyingly impressed by del Prado’s windy musings on things like whether God’s promise of eternity is actually a threat, Irons drops everything to tear around Lisbon (photographed to gorgeous effect). The supporting cast includes Bruno Ganz, Charlotte Rampling and Christopher Lee (the young actors playing these veterans in flashbacks are limp in comparison). But it’s all terribly talky and low-energy; that wonderful noirish title, it turns out, was just a front for a history lecture.