The Girl on the Train (15) 2010 – La Fille du RER - 105 minutes

Don’t wait for the train!

The latest film from French Director and screen writer, Andre Techine, deals with the true story of a notorious fabrication.

In 2004, a young French girl claimed to have been attacked on a suburban train by a group of men, significantly, of Arab and African origin. Apparently mistaking her for a Jewess, the alleged anti-Semites scraped a knife blade across her cheeks and drew swastikas on her stomach.

While her immediate family and indeed the police were both sceptical as to the veracity of her story – there were a number of fairly obvious inconsistencies – both the media and the political authorities decided to use the incident for their own ends and subsequently blew the incident out of all proportion. The girl then admitted that the entire story had been false

The film initially however, attempts to place the incident into some sort of context. We find the girl, Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne ) already living a lie, spending her day rollerblading and listening to music but telling her childminding mother, Louise, ( elegantly played by Catherine Deneuve) that she is constantly interviewing for legal secretarial positions. She continues to drift eventually falling in love and moving in with Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a professional wrestler who deals drugs on the side.

Her aimless existence however, offers few insights into what is to come. The sub plots – the episode with Franck, her relationship with a Jewish lawyer Samuel,(Michel Blanc) to whom Louise turns to for help and indeed Samuel’s rather complex relationship with his family – run in parallel rather than in synch with the main theme leaving the viewers confused and disorientated. Techine’s imaginative and complex use of sound – whether it be suburban trains running thunderously through endlessly dark tunnels or computer keyboards being struck unnecessarily violently – consequently becomes irritating and unexpected rather than reflecting and indeed complementing the troubled state of Jeanne’s tortured mind, as was surely intended.
The characters do their best to make sense from this jumble of themes. Deneuve and Blanc are particularly competent although neither is stretched. Deneuve is as serene and unruffled as ever while Blanc is no longer cast as the stereotypical loser or hypochondriac. Dequenne is impressively successful in remaining entirely biddable, passive and unemotional throughout and Duvauchelle is plausibly tough, arrogant and persuasive.

Verdict
Techine manages to maintain some sort of rhythm and almost despite itself the movie is oddly absorbing but despite some competent performances, this is exactly the sort of movie that gives art house a bad name.

Dick Morgan
June 2010