The film starts off with a man, named Schlomo (Lionel Abelanski), running crazily through a forest, with his voice playing in the background, saying that he has seen the horror of the Nazis in a nearby town, and he must tell the others.

On their escape route through rural Eastern Europe, the train sees tensions between its inhabitants, close encounters with real Nazis as well as Communist partisans, and fraternization with the Roma, until the community arrives just at the frontlines between German and Soviet fire.

[3] Writer-director Mihăileanu said that reporters came to ask him about Shlomo's ultimate fate which the film leaves open, whether he will perish during the war or if he will survive.

"[3] Several American reviewers saw a distinct similarity between Mihăileanu's filmic yarn and the mood and humor found in the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sholem Aleichem.

[8][16][17][18] Far superior to either Life Is Beautiful or Jakob the Liar, the French-language production has a silliness and a buffoonish humor reminiscent of Amarcord and Fellini's Roma, yet somehow it feels neither excessive nor offensive.

It isn't an easy balance to achieve.This is an offbeat and earnest piece of work, which focuses itself on telling its ripping yarn in a comic and poignant manner rather than drenching it in sentimentality.

Mihaileanu tells the fable with a fantastical, vaguely surreal feel, that makes clever use of some standard Jewish tunes and draws neat performances from Abelanski's tragi-comic Shlomo, and De La Fontaine as the village crumpet who creates the movie's most endearing running gag by endlessly falling for the wrong man.

It's a likeable oddity, certainly, but in treading such well-heeled turf it also becomes an unremarkable one.Mihaileanu goes to great pains to emphasize the tragedy of the circumstances, although he does so in a somewhat belated and unconventional manner.

Instead, Train of Life is a thought-provoking and subversively entertaining chronicle that sheds a quirky light on a death-black era in history.If Mihaileanu's movie portrays the Jews in the tradition of storytellers Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer as dolts, dunces and misguided prophets, this is his wholly positive intention.

[...] Shlomo's tale is mythical, a fable, a fairy story of a part with that large group of folklore designed to help make life bearable for a people subjected to persecution for thousands of years.

[...] When Train of Life is moving at top speed, Mihaileanu strikes an interesting compromise between portraying the flustered, anxious members of the community as they race to escape an almost certain, deadly fate, and injecting strains of flat-out vaudevillian comedy.

It's a tough mix to hold together, and the two styles occasionally clash, but the film has such a bizarre, surrealistic tone to begin with that the topsy-turviness of it all manages to echo the madness of wartime to a tee.

It's a comedy, it's a horror show, it's a romance, and it's a call to Communist arms—it's such an oddball assemblage that it simply can't click all the time, but when it fires on all cylinders, it's one of the most shocking, affecting Holocaust films yet seen.[...]

[...] Mihaileanu [...] asks you to accept a number of preposterous suppositions - from the main theme to the Fiddler on the Roof kind of joie de vivre to the idea that Shlomo can stand on top of a train car as it whizzes through the countryside - but stick with him.