La Fille du RER (2009) - film review

Twenty-something Jeanne lives with her mother Louise in a Paris suburb.  Whilst Louise occupies herself as a child minder, Jeanne is busy looking for work.  Jeanne is surprised to learn that the celebrated lawyer Samuel Bleistein was once romantically attached to her mother, and she wastes no time applying for a job with his law firm.  Meanwhile, she starts an affair with a young sportsman named Franck.  After Franck is arrested for complicity with a drugs trafficking operation, Jeanne goes off the rails and makes out that she has been the victim of a racist attack...

After his powerful AIDS-themed drama Les Temoins (2007), director André Téchiné next turned his attention to another major scourge 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, and this could explain why the film appears so lightweight and has such difficulty in making a coherent statement about racism and racial provocation.

Unlike Les Temoins, which does have a clear political thrust, La Fille du RER does not bother to get too caught up in 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 a pretty nebulous one - the inscrutability of human nature.  It prompts us to wonder 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.  The impression is that Téchiné lost interest in the subject halfway through and just gave up on it.

The main problem with the film is that it has too many elements, too many secondary characters, and consequently lacks cohesion.  It feels like a rather lazily spliced together montage of story ideas, with no strong underlying central theme to hold it together.  La Fille du RER offers few surprises and is a comparatively low-key affair which is content to explore human relationships at a very superficial level, resorting to rather bland archetypes instead of developing convincing character portrayals. The film offers neither the blistering intensity of Les Roseaux sauvages nor the sublime poetry of Alice et Martin, but it is nonetheless well-acted (once again Téchiné assembles a superb cast) and is, for all its obvious shortcomings, an eminently watchable piece of drama.

In the eponymous lead role, Émilie Dequenne evokes something of 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, and for all the right reasons) have a startling erotic 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 lawyer-cum-Jewish spokesman (both actors look as if they are slumming it).
 
On the strength of its performances, La Fille du RER manages to hold our attention, but it is hard to get away from its script deficiencies and you are left wondering why Téchiné is so unwilling to engage with the issue of racism.  Instead, the director restricts himself to rehearsing the same old platitudes about Jewish identity whilst proffering only the most mealy mouthed warning about the dangers of over-reacting to racial provocation.  After the remarkable Les Temoins, this film can only be something of a letdown.

© James Travers 2010-2012

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