User reviews

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.

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.

There have been three films and two novels with the title THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. (There is also a novel called GIRL ON A TRAIN.) The earlier novel was written by my friend Peter Whitehead, but it has never been filmed. The second novel was made into the third film. Of the three films, this was the first, though its title in French was very different, namely LA FILLE DU RER (THE GIRL OF THE R.E.R.). For those unfamiliar with the underground systems of Paris, there are two. The first is the well-known Metro, which goes short hops a few minutes apart. The second is called the R.E.R. It goes for long distances between a few main stops and extends way out to the far suburbs, being a genuine rapid transit system for commuters. So the girl of this story is not really on a train per se, she is merely on a commuter service which starts overground and goes underground when it reaches the centre of Paris. Four years later, a less well known film of the title was made in America, with its action commencing at New York's Grand Central Station. And in 2016, a British film of this title was made with Emily Blunt, which has had a considerable commercial success and is the best known of the three. This one is a brilliantly made film by that old pro, André Téchiné. He directs films as effortlessly as water flows under a bridge. But that is not to say that the film is wholly satisfying. The script is very good, but the story conception is somewhat perplexing, with insufficient background information. Hence it lacks focus, unlike the cameras.The director presumably must have wanted to make a film which remained enigmatic and suggestive, leaving us guessing about the layers beneath. That must have been his intention, and in that he succeeded. But is that really effective? The central character in the film is a very young woman, really still a girl, who is 'all mixed up', to say the least of it. No effort is made to get us to sympathise with her, nor is any made to get us to dislike her. We are meant to be puzzled observers. It is clear from the very beginning that she is wilful, foolish, pig-headed, and astonishingly stupid. She has a vague childlike charm, but she also can snarl and pout at the drop of a hat. Her father was an Army officer who was killed in battle in Afghanistan when she was 5, and she has been raised by a rather aloof mother, played by France's leading ice queen, Catherine Deneuve. Deneuve shows a surprising amount of diffused and unfocused sympathy, clearly trying hard to love her child but finding it difficult. The daughter tells her very sinister drug-dealer boyfriend that she and her mother are so close that they are 'inseparable', but that is merely one of the girl's many disembodied fantasies. She wants to be loved but is not at all discriminating about who might do so. In other words, she is a lost young soul wandering the world, dressed only in a smile. The girl is played to perfection by an extremely talented young Belgian actress, Émilie Dequenne, who at 28 looked and behaved younger. She played Valentine in the 2006 film of LE GRAND MEAULNES. The girl inexplicably goes to pieces and fabricates a sensational tale of having been assaulted by anti-Semites while travelling on the RER. Before boarding it, she had cut herself with a knife to make a gash on her face, cut off part of her hair, and drawn swastikas (as it happens, the wrong way round) on her stomach. She then goes to the police and claims this was all done to her by neo-fascist yobs. This causes a scandal in the press and even the President of the Republic issues a statement of sympathy for her. But then her story unravels when it is realized that she made it all up. She does not appear to realize why she did this, nor can anyone else figure it out. She is not even Jewish. The story is far more complicated than this, and involves penetrating studies of several characters, resulting in a tapestry portrait of some intersecting lives and groups of people constituting a haphazard milieu, all of whom are in their own ways deeply perplexing. So I suppose the director wanted us to know just how strange everyone really is. I believe him.

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.

This movie consists of scenes of a girl Rollerblading, occasionally interrupted by a failed attempt at storyline and character study. Before, or better if, you read any further: Don't Waste Your Time.

This movie was 102 Minutes, but honestly felt double that length. The whole thing stunk, but here come the specific aspects of reek. We are never given any motivation for the "true event" culmination this movie is based around. There are peripheral stories and characters that are useless to plot development and uninteresting. It's slow, it goes nowhere and if I hadn't been watching it with other people I would have shut it off about 3/4s of the way through.

I think there is still a contingent of American people out there that believe foreign equals complex and innovative. Watch this Rollerblading commercial called a movie and you'll realize that merde is merde in any language. (Look it up).

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.

André Téchiné's 'The Girl on the Train' (La fille du RER) focuses on a naive girl Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) who fabricates a story about being attacked on a suburban Paris train by black and Arab youths who supposedly mistook her for a Jew. The story is based on a real event that took place in France in 2004, adapted for the stage by Jean-Marie Besset as 'RER', and written for the screen by Besset, Odile Barski, and director Téchiné. Téchiné, stating that 'the story became the mirror of all French fears, a revelation of what we call the 'collective unconscious.' How an individual's lie is transformed into truth with respect to the community at large and its fears', 'The Girl on the Train' dissects the psychological circumstances and consequences surrounding a bold lie in a rich drama, concentrating on the permutations such an act has one all concerned.

Jeanne lives with her single mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve) who manages the family finances as a childcare provider. Jeanne spends the greater part of her time roller skating and it is on one of her excursions that she meets the rather mysterious Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a young wrestler who immediately attempts to win Jeanne's attention and affection despite Jeanne's insecurities. They eventually respond to the mutual chemistry and Franck searches for a way to help Jeanne out of financial difficulties: they become caretakers in a warehouse home, which is unbeknownst to Jeanne, a drug trafficking site. An incident occurs when a 'buyer' shows up and Franck is stabbed in defending his caretaker job and Jeanne's future. Jeanne is distraught but when she visits Franck in the hospital, Franck blames Jeanne for his bad luck and rebuffs her - he must now serve prison time for his involvement in the drug game.

Now, torn between her loss of money, her new 'home', and the love of Franck, Jeanne plans a manner of striking back: she slices her skin, clips her hair, and paints swastikas on her abdomen and reports that she has been attacked by anti-Semites. Louise seeks the assistance of an old flame who is now the important Jewish lawyer Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc) - man with whom Jeanne had unsuccessfully interviewed for a job - and what Louise thought would be a protection for both Franck and Jeanne results in Jeanne's confession that she fabricated the entire incident, a factor that disrupts the lives of all those affected by the lie, especially the family of Bleistein already teetering on disintegration due to the rocky marriage of his son and daughter-in-law and the preparation for the grandson's contested Bar Mitzvah.

Téchiné knows how to take seemingly ordinary people and circumstances and show the profound effect of evil wherever it raises its head. The film is enhanced by the verismo photography by Julien Hirsch and the apropos musical score by Philippe Sarde. While this film is not quite up to the standards of Téchiné's films such as 'Wild reeds', 'My Favorite Season', 'Changing Times' or 'Strayed', it still maintains that realistic surface beneath which lies the real grit of life. In French with English subtitles.

Grady Harp