La fille du RER

Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) is a beautiful roller blading girl. Her mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve) was an ex to prominent Jewish crusading lawyer Samuel Bleistein. Jeanne fails to get a job with him. She starts dating sketchy Franck. He's arrested and then he rejects her. She's heartbroken and fakes an attack by neo-Nazis on a train even cutting herself.

She's an enigma wrapped in a mystery performed by a blank actress. I don't feel like the movie explain anything about her. Dequenne is a beautiful girl but I don't get a sense of her character. In many ways, she is the least interesting character in the movie. As for the story, it's not terribly intense or dramatic. The danger for her is so low. This is supposedly inspired by true events. It does make me wonder about the real story. This could have been a great exciting character study.

André Téchiné's newest film The Girl on the Train is a combination topical expose and sophisticated melodrama. Using a real-life case where Alice (Emilie Dequenne), a girl from a banlieu outside Paris lied about being the victim of a bias attack, Téchiné takes the emotional pulse of hate crimes and finds symptoms of common psychological distress. In other words, it's a love story from the uniquely expansive—and inquiring—point of view that makes Téchiné France's most fascinating contemporary filmmaker.

The first sight of Alice rollerskating through the streets, thick curly hair surrounding her stolid face, presents a "normal" Téchiné youth—complex, enigmatic, hypersensitive to the world. Alice's place in the universe, and her politically incorrect actions, recall the troubled boy in the 1987 Scene of the Crime where Téchiné evoked the template of Great Expectations to explore how one character's fortune linked to and revealed a larger, social view of destiny.

Pondering Alice's emotional life when she falls in love with a young wrestler, Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), takes Techine beneath the surface stability of other characters. Alice's mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve) was a nonconformist now settled by maternity and unsettled by encountering an old acquaintance, Jewish activist Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc). Techine intermixes these histories and on-going fates; his quick, graceful pace, piercing insight and visual flair are perfectly symbolized in Alice's rollerskating sprees. One is constantly propelled and dazzled.

Alice's heterosexual female story keeps Téchiné several leaps ahead of one's expectations—and especially the intellectualized gay-ghetto preoccupations of his sex-and-psychology protégé Jacques Nolot (Before I Forget, Porn Theatre).

The contrasts between Alice and Louise, Bleistein and Franck vividly illustrate the common effort to achieve satisfaction and strength. For Téchiné, race, class and gender give access to understanding this constant struggle. His post-modern approach, through Dickens, Lean, even the Dardennes brothers (Dequennes is best known for their film Rosetta) remains unsentimental about obdurate human nature. And for those further intrigued by these mysteries of love and character and society—and their authenticity—an honorary soundtrack to the emotions Téchiné uncovers in The Girl on the Train can also be found in every track of Morrissey's Years of Refusal.

I just watched this film in the cinema, and I got to say, at the end I was walking out of the cinema with a big smile on my face. Not because I had seen a very good movie, but rather because I found the sheer randomness of the narrative pretty funny.

The movie tries to give a psychological motivation for the actions of its protagonist Jeanne, but what it actually accomplishes is very a fragmented sketch of Jeanne's life. There seems to be some causality in the narrative, but nowhere is there real motivation for the plot events. A lot of loose ends are left untied, and I kind of wondered why some things were even shown.

The film style is sloppy and unimaginative. The director tries to establish a motif by repeatedly showing shots involving a metro, but the shots don't really fit well and its only purpose seems to be to remind us of what the movie is about (if you knew before going to see the movie). The editing is fragmentary and mediocre, the cinematography seems okay.

I wouldn't really recommend seeing this film, though as I said before, I did enjoy myself, if not really for the reason I was supposed to.

What a riveting drama, powerful movie inspired from actual events. The main element of this film is introduced after the first half of the film, nothing predicts this element, except if you have read the plot, the summary in advance. This story could only be inspired from actual events; if not it would have been totally incredible, unlikely at the most. Reality sometimes goes beyond fiction, that's precisely on this point that true stories on screen are better than pure fiction. On this point only, because a true story which looks like a fiction is not interesting at all for me. Good cast, with the likes of Michel Blanc, Emilie Dequenne, Catherine Deneuve....

The Girl on the Train (2009)

The hook that made this movie successful is not enough to make the movie good. The added plot in the first half fizzles and seems ultimately irrelevant. Yes, the main actress plays the part of an "airhead," as the subtitle translates her stupidity. But the movie itself has some of the same disease. It lacks formal intelligence, and it stretches out a few basic ideas over 105 minutes, posing as a serious movie with serious implications.

Not that it's misery to watch. In a way, the fact that you get sucked in waiting and waiting for some basic conflict to formulate says something about the acting and editing. This is contemporary Paris, or a cozy, idealized side to it. And you can't dismiss the theme of anti-Semitism, which gets some elaboration and complexity as you go, including some great, if simplified, conversations between Jews at their country house about what it means to be a contemporary Jew. It's conveniently packaged, but adds some needed interest to the events.

This leads eventually to a rather long and oddly placed bar mitzvah celebration, and some more roller blading filler. It's a frustrating thing to see all this content watered down by a single turn of events, the faked hate crime attack, which happens well past the halfway point of the movie. And around which the suspense of being fooled is left out of the movie, because we are told everything as it happens.