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TagsBY MIRIAM RINN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
MOVIE REVIEW
Andre Techine's "The Girl on the Train" is one of those films that you watch completely absorbed, and then wonder after you leave the theater, what was that all about? I'm not sure whether that's a recommendation or not, but the film is equally mesmerizing and mystifying. A skilled director, Techine brings out wonderful performances from the lead actors Emilie Dequienne and Nicolas Duvauchelle as her lover, creating an aura of menace and mystery in the first half of the movie that slowly disintegrates in the second half.
Based on a play that itself was based on a real incident, the film is formally divided in two: the first half is titled Circumstances and the second, Consequences. The incident that sparked both play and film took place in 2004. A young non-Jewish French woman falsely claimed that she had been attacked in a suburban train station by a group of men whom she described as Arabs. She told police that the men went through her wallet, surmised that she was Jewish, and then beat her, drew swastikas on her body, and cut her hair with a knife, all while other passengers looked on. Politicians and French intellectuals reacted with horror, and lots was written and said about the evils of anti-Semitism, a problem that has been seen to be on the rise in France since 2000. Soon, doubts began to emerge about the truthfulness of the report, and eventually the young woman confessed that she had made it all up and drawn the swastikas herself. Americans will certainly recall the furor surrounding the similar 1987 Tawana Brawley incident in upstate New York.
Techine introduces Jeanne as a footloose young woman living with her childcare-provider mother (played by a beautifully aging and decidedly unglamorous Catherine Deneuve) in a suburb far from Paris. Her mother goes through the want ads looking for a job for Jeanne, and although Jeanne behaves a bit strangely at the interview with an old lawyer flame of her mom‘s, there's no indication that she's anything other than an immature underachiever. Rollerblading home, she meets Franck, an intense young wrestler who is smitten at first sight. Their romance blossoms and soon the couple move into an empty place, where Franck has gotten a job as a caretaker. Life there is so idyllic that the audience is totally unprepared for the violence that ensues. Until now, the film has felt like a moody romance with some class-division undertones.
Shifting tone, the second half deals with Jeanne's act on the train and its consequences. But where does that act come from? Techine implies that the girl is motivated by strong guilt feelings and a desire to identify with suffering, but Jeanne hasn't been presented as disturbed or exhibitionistic enough to concoct such a charade. In addition, the parallel storyline in the film about the Jewish lawyer's family, which comes to the fore in the second half, feels much less authentic than the relationship between Jeanne and Franck, and eventually it pulls the film in an overly intellectualized direction. The lawyer's son and Israeli daughter-in-law are separated, but come together to plan a bar mitzvah celebration for their son. This romance is supposed to echo the relationship between Jeanne and Franck, highlighting the younger couple's isolation. Compared to the Jewish couple's stupid bickering, however, Jeanne and Franck seem to exist in an Eden before the fall. The lawyer's story feels highly contrived, as if it was imported from some other film, and there's too much abstract discussion about identity and media and such. The Jewish couple's son looks and acts far too old to be a bar mitzvah boy. In general, things start to fall apart. The remarkable aspect of the film is that despite the weakness of the second half, the spell cast in the first part remains intact for a surprisingly long time. Techine and his young actors create a strange, sensual space where two isolated people find joy for a short time.
"The Girl on the Train" opened Jan. 22.
