Film Review
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
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next André Téchiné film:
Impardonnables (2011)