L'Homme du Train (12A)

Pass me a pipe and slippers, I feel like a new man

What little reputation Johnny Hallyday has in Britain is as a bad joke about French pop – as a superannuated ersatz Elvis, a relic from even before the yé-yé years. In France, however, Hallyday – plain "Zhonnee" to his fans – is taken pretty seriously, not only as a hardened showbiz survivor but as an icon of old-school populist culture. Not only that, he's acted in films by Jean-Luc Godard and Costa-Gavras. The day Ken Loach creates a lead role for Reg Presley of the Troggs, then we can afford to snigger.

In L'Homme du Train, Hallyday is teamed with another wizened veteran, Jean Rochefort. We're talking two kinds of leathery here: while Hallyday's features look weathered with sun and liquor, Rochefort's face is softly distressed chamois, the sort that might be used for a dainty but dependable tobacco pouch.

Hallyday is affectingly pensive as Milan, a taciturn loner who pitches up in a small, dead French town and finds himself lodging with Manesquier (Rochefort), an elderly ex-schoolteacher of settled habits. This fastidiously peppery old cove promptly latches onto this new acquaintance and gushes forth confidences about his ancestors, his love of Schubert, and his childhood habit of masturbating over 19th-century nudes.

Both men have dates with destiny – Manesquier is awaiting a triple bypass operation, while Milan is about to rob the local bank. (They are both l'homme du train, in fact – while Milan literally arrives by rail, le train in French also connotes drab routine, like Manesquier's.) Claude Klotz's script is entirely and shamelessly predictable, which in a sense is the whole point – the two men must inevitably learn from each other, gaining satisfaction late in their frustrated lives, and gradually swapping roles. Manesquier tries a racy new haircut and confronts a tough in his local café – which provides the film's one genuinely surprising gag – while Milan starts wearing slippers and smoking a pipe. (He also trims his facial hair to a pencil moustache, making Hallyday oddly resemble Bob Dylan in his current Vincent-Price-as-Dr-Phibes incarnation).

Director Patrice Leconte may not be quite pipe-and-slippers himself, but he's hardly the wildest of French film-makers. Nothing if not versatile, he can sometimes be inspired, but rarely for the length of an entire film – his eccentric 1990 comedy The Hairdresser's Husband will be best remembered for Rochefort's improbably lithe Arabic dancing, and for a joke about woollen swimming trunks. Ridicule (1996), set in the court of Louis XVI, stands out as a brilliant exception, but Leconte can also be precious, awkwardly showy or just plain drab.

What often distinguishes his films, however, is a bruised melancholy, and a taste for disappointed heroes who wear life's scars more or less heavily. L'Homme du Train, then, could be described as quintessential Leconte, but it's not his most sparkling work. It's hard to imagine why, of all recent French productions, Britain's Film Council decided to invest in this downbeat, moody character piece; Leconte has had UK hits, but I can't see this being one of them. For one thing, its characters frequently trade quotations from French poems – unidentified, but presumably familiar to most French baccalaureate graduates – and Hallyday even gives an impromptu tutorial on Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet. You somehow can't imagine a British film about a bank job including lines from AE Housman or a discussion of The Mill on the Floss (or the Film Council wanting to sponsor it in a hurry).

The film's whole raison d'être is the unlikely encounter between two hardy leads, although, given the sardonic nature of Hallyday's character, it is Rochefort who powers the whole thing: he's one of the few actors anywhere who can get away with twinkling, largely because his face, like a malnourished beagle's, offsets whimsy with its louche weirdness. Even so, Rochefort is landed with far too much dandyish chat. Especially when the two men mooch around at Manesquier's crumbling manor, the film feels as if it started out as a drawing-room comedy. It didn't, in fact, yet it has the feel of a stage play opened out: you might say it's a film that has been folded in.

The package is pleasurable but a little calculating, with much of the eccentricity feeling as though it has been gratuitously sprinkled on top: the silent thug who delivers one gnomic saying everyday at 10 o'clock sharp could be a belated left-over from Diva. Pascal Estève's score keeps dropping Ry Cooder-styled slide guitar to stress that we're seeing a modern Western, but we could tell that from cinematographer Jean-Marie Dréjou's widescreen Sergio Leone compositions. And the hyper-grainy photography plays curious colour tricks, apparently in homage to the Impressionist palette (as a visit to an art gallery suggests), with a faintly chemical blue for exteriors and a yellow like parchment and old tobacco for Manesquier's home.

All this comes across as very mild mannerism, though. Leconte's style, you might say, is a moderate man's answer to the visual excesses of the cinema du look, the legacy of which has continued to dominate mainstream French cinema since the Eighties. Perhaps this is really what the film is about. Just as elderly, sensible old Manesquier puts on Milan's leather jacket and pretends to be Wyatt Earp in front of the mirror, you wonder whether Leconte himself doesn't quietly dream of being a younger, flashier cinematic gunslinger – a Luc Besson, a Mathieu Kassovitz, even (God forbid) a Gaspar Noé.

j.romney@independent.co.uk