Called The Girl on the Train here in the States...even though that's not quite the right translation...
This is a French film about a young woman named Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) living outside Paris who while skating into Paris one day to look for a job, meets a fellow roller-blader named Franck. A romance soon starts but once she moves in with him it is revealed that he is involved with drug trafficking. After he is caught and arrested, Jeanne is inspired by a recent rise in antisemitism in Paris and stages an attack on herself (she is not Jewish). The rest of the film follows Jeanne's mother (Catherine Deneuve) as she goes to an old friend of hers named Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc) for help with her daughter.
La Fille du RER is a rather languid and meandering film. While the plot is easy enough to describe, and told linearly, there are a lot of little scenes with supporting characters that don't add to the overall narrative. This produces a film that despite having a interesting trio at its core (Dequenne, Deneuve and Blanc) has one too many scenes that either don't hold your interest or don't add to the story.
The best moments of the film are all rather understated and yet oddly compelling. The way Jeanne first meets her boyfriend, a moment between Samuel's grandson and Jeanne when they first meet, or a conversation over lunch between Jeanne, her mother, and all of Samuel's family...these little moments, the kind of naturalistic scenes that are quite rare in American cinema, most stood out of me.
The undercurrent about antisemitism in modern France is never played too heavily and I thought that the theme was very nicely handled. The film is based on a play, which was based on a true story, and I liked how the main incident of the film (Jeanne faking her attack) is handled in a minimalist and blunt way.
The acting from the main three actors is all strong. As Jeanne, Dequenne (who I recognized from Brotherhood of the Wolf) is beautiful and hard to fully understand. We get why she does what she does...but she never really lets us know who she is inside. Seeing as she's always supposed to be a bit of a mystery to those around her I thought her performance worked well. Deneuve is sympathetic and realistic. Blanc is especially good as a lawyer who is quite content with his life. He has a quiet presence that carries every scene he's in.
The movie is a bit dull, and I don't actually think it has anything profound to say (but I think the filmmakers think they do), and there were too many moments that just didn't work for me. I don't really recommend the film but I'm always happy to see what kind of cinema is being made around the world. La Fille du RER has some interesting aspects...but not enough.
Grade: C+
Best Scene: The lunch scene at Samuel's summer house...
Monday, February 1, 2010
Henry Saw: La Fille du RER
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2 comments:
I agree with everything that is said here except the conclusion. I think the film is worth seeing, provided the viewer is armed with suitably modest expectations, for its understated riffs on the theme of self-esteem.
It seems a particular characteristic of French cinema to rely on our total sympathy for a charcter based solely on the facts that she is young, beautiful, and gives an impression of elusiveness; with those qualities established, it seems, the directors are content to provide virtually nothing else to fill out the character. Bbt if you assume that sympathy for the lead character here, you get, in a few brush strokes, a clinic on how an absence of self-esteem can lead to confusing subtle bullying for love. This girl from the RER, the commuter train linking Paris to the "banlieue", which translates into suburbs except that in Paris the image is not of John Cheever country but of concrete projects and tiny indistinguishable houses for office workers to low-level to afford living in paris or to drive into Paris (our protagonist's mother is a child-minder and the protagonist herself apparently too grossly unqualified to get work in her chosen field of office assistant), thinks she has found love and established independence when in fact she has entered into a deceptive and dependent relationship..
When she realizes she has been deceived, she builds a rickety stage for a very brief moment of attention out of materials appropriated from the person who in her tiny world has the height of status and self-esteem, the successful jewish lawyer and television commentator played by Blanc.
When called on to rescue mother and daugheter from the hash the duaghter's false accusations have made of things, he naturally finds a way to enhance his own stature in the process. The daughter in plane prison garb in a tiny, bare-concrete holding room that is more shaft than cell, has learned a lesson, but perhaps the only ones who can profit from such lessons are those alreayd blessed with the self-esteem and stature that can allow them to reinterpret the lesson to suit their own end...
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Very well put. I admit my biggest gap of film knowledge is foreign films and so I'm not completely in-tuned to the pace and style of French cinema. I've seen the "big" ones...The Class, Time-Out, etc...but not enough to understand how they expect the audience to relate to characters.
I agree with you that Jeanne has a self-esteem issue...though I always find that a hard trait to buy when you're dealing with a beautiful girl...and it does change how I understand the film. I thought it was more about French antisemitism than anything else but when I think of it as a character study it works much better.
Thanks for the post...very interesting stuff
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