La Fille du RER (2009)

La Fille du RER is a French film first released in 2009, directed by André Téchiné.  The film stars Catherine Deneuve, Émilie Dequenne, Ronit Elkabetz, Nicolas Duvauchelle and Michel Blanc.  It has also been released under the title: The Girl on the Train.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Jeanne lives with her mother Louise in a Paris suburb, a harmonious arrangement that suits both of them.  Whilst Louise occupies herself as a child minder, Jeanne is busy looking for work.  Louise persuades her daughter to go for a job interview for the post of a secretary for an old flame of hers, Samuel Bleistein, now a successful lawyer.   When Jeanne and Bleistein fail to hit it off, the former has no option but to continue her job hunt.  Jeanne may not realise it, but Bleistein’s life story is about to have a dramatic impact on her life...

After his powerful AIDS-themed drama Les Temoins (2007), director André Téchiné next turned his attention to another major theme of our times, racism.  La Fille du RER is inspired by a real-life incident from 2004 in which a young Parisian woman claimed to have been attacked by neo-Nazi anti-Semites when the wounds were in fact self-inflicted.  This case provoked a media frenzy in France and was the subject of a stage play by Jean-Marie Besset.  Although Besset collaborated with Téchiné on the screenplay, the film has little overlap with his play.

Unlike Les Temoins, which does have a noticeable political angle, La Fille du RER does not probe too deeply into the politics of racism.  In fact, the racially tinted elements of the plot are merely there to add substance to the character study of a volatile young woman and her all-too-complacent bourgeois entourage.  If the film has a central theme, it is the inscrutability of human nature.  It prompts us to ask why people behave as they do, but doesn’t attempt to provide any answers.  The most worrying aspect of the simulated racial attack that provides the fulcrum of the story - i.e. why a seemingly well-balanced young woman can do such an irrational thing - is left as an unanswered question, and this feels like a cop out.

Unlike many previous André Téchiné films, La Fille du RER offers few surprises and is a comparatively low-key affair which is content to explore human relationships at the pace of an asthmatic snail.  The film offers neither the blistering passion of Les Roseaux sauvages nor the sublime poetry of Alice et Martin but is nonetheless a solid and eminently watchable piece of drama, directed with panache and well performed by some of French cinema’s finest actors.  

In the enigmatic lead role, Émilie Dequenne evokes the wild and mysterious thing she had previously played in the Dardennes brothers’ arresting social drama Rosetta (1999).  In spite of the abundance of talent that surrounds her, it is Dequenne who grabs our attention from the outset (not difficult when you are shooting about Paris on rollerblades) and is easily the film’s focal point.  Her scenes with Nicolas Duvauchelle (another fine actor whose career is now very much in the ascendant) have a startling intensity which makes the rest of the film appear pretty tame by comparison.  In her sixth Téchiné film, Catherine Deneuve is only just convincing as a child minder and single mum, just as Michel Blanc only just about gets away with playing a Jewish spokesman.

La Fille du RER is as beautifully crafted as any other André Téchiné film, its slick mise-en-scène and lush cinematography making it a highly attractive viewing proposition irrespective of its narrative content.  However, pretty as it is, it clearly lacks the substance and emotional force of previous Téchiné films, and you have to wonder why the director is so reluctant to engage in the polemic relating to the incident that first inspired the film.  The film’s allusion to the dangers of over-reacting to racist provocation are subdued to the point of being invisible, so that in the end you are left wondering what the film is meant to be about.

© James Travers 2010

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