Le Hérisson (2009) - film review

Renée Michel is not the uncultivated concierge that she pretends to be, but a fifty-something woman with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a passion for great works of literature.  Paloma is not the sweet innocent girl that she appears to be, but a 12-year old who has become so disgusted by the adults around her that she has decided to kill herself.  The fortunes of these two solitary and sensitive females are changed forever when a strange Japanese man, Kakuro Ozu, enters their lives...

With its constantly shifting points of view and extended musings on philosophy and literature, Muriel Barbery’s 2006 bestselling novel L’Elégance du hérisson was never going to make an easy transition to the big screen, but director Mona Achache makes a reasonable stab of adapting it for her feature debut.  By paring back the narrative to the bare bones and focussing on the essentials, Achache extracts a compelling and distinctive drama that retains something of the literary power of Barbery’s novel.  As she does so, Achache makes some thoughtful observations on the solitude of the intellectual and on how people regard others in a society where we find it increasingly difficult to talk to one another.

Le Hérisson is a film that powerfully demonstrates how individuals can become trapped in their inner world if they allow their prejudices and low self-esteem to govern their lives.  Whilst outwardly they could not be more different, the three main protagonists are inwardly very much alike - they find it hard to accept the world around them and prefer to wallow in their own private havens.  It is the authenticity with which these three characters are portrayed (by three extremely talented actors) that makes the film so effective and so moving, despite its deficiencies in other departments.  These characters are not the kind that a cinema audience would naturally engage with - they are withdrawn, plain-looking and bookish - yet they are drawn with such depth and humanity that you cannot help but sympathise with them as, hedgehog-like, they timidly look out on a world that offers them no comfort or hope.

Heavily made up to look like a crone from a Victor Hugo novel, Josiane Balasko brings home the fallacy of judging by appearances with her exquisitely poignant portrayal of a solitary concierge whose only joy lies between the covers of great works of literature.  When we first see her, Balasko looks like something that has just escaped from the parapets of Notre-Dame Cathedral, and naturally we are repelled by her; but as the tragedy of her character’s predicament becomes apparent, as her human qualities assert themselves, we cannot help warming to her and, in the end, we are struck by her beauty.  Garance Le Guillermic is equally arresting as the pre-teen Peeping Tom who (through a process of logical reasoning that would confound both Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell) has made up her mind to kill herself, a performance of surprising maturity for one so young and so seemingly innocent.  Meanwhile, Togo Igawa brings an understated pathos to his portrayal of a solitary Japanese man who is as cut off by cultural barriers as Balasko’s character is by the class divide. Ariane Ascaride and Anne Brochet bring further lustre to the film with their well-judged supporting contributions.  On the acting front at least, the film is beyond reproach.

Le Hérisson has many strengths but it is far from being a flawless piece of cinema.  Unevenly paced and punctuated by some pointlessly protracted moments of introspection it does place great demands on the spectator.  Yet, between its sluggish beginning and clumsily truncated ending, there are some scenes of exceptional power, notably those in which the three unloved protagonists struggle to draw one other out of their respective shells in the hope of kindling a fragile friendship.  There are some obvious gaffs - the chief offender being a truly risible sequence in which one of the characters is abruptly killed off in the manner of a Bugs Bunny cartoon (nothing robs a scene of emotional impact more than a totally misplaced CGI shot) - but overall the film has much to commend it.  If her first cinema offering is anything to go by, Mona Achache has the makings of a great auteur filmmaker, and who can resist reading Muriel Barbery’s remarkable novel after feasting on this heart-warming adaptation?

© James Travers 2012

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