Patrice Chereau's amazingly photographed film is about a group of friends and lovers of a deceased artist, Jean-Baptiste, who held something of a spell over the twelve or so people who are travelling a fairly great distance by train together to go to his funeral. The travellers haven't gotten along with each other in the past and largely haven't seen each other in years, so it was Baptiste's last wish that they all should have to travel a fair distance together on a train to get to his funeral. A troublemaker by profession, Baptiste knows his entourage too well, and knows that the journey will cause them to quarrel, flirt, reconcile, mourn, and discover that there is something that links them all together. Not only one of the best French films of the 1990s, but one of the best films of that decade, period.