The Girl on the Train

        

       Anti-Semitism is a problem in Europe. Jewish hate crimes are not uncommon and many of the recent crimes have been committed by European Muslims. Nazi and Fascist groups, while tacitly illegal and still in a minority, are on the rise in Eastern Europe. While the crimes and ideological hatred must be addressed, it seems as though many European filmmakers feel the only way to stay relevant—and to gain international appreciation for their films—is to deal, however indirectly, with the subjects of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Sometimes it is genuine guilt and sometimes it is opportunism. It is always a slippery method of politicizing film; making films part of the so-called Jewish Question. The Girl on the Train is a film that falls in to the Jewish Question category. 

        The first questions that come to our minds are not about Jews or guilt or opportunism. They are about color, quirkiness and the French film style; or what’s left of it. The opening credit sequence—both vigorous and simplistic—is from the point of view of a train passing through a dark, winding tunnel. When it comes out in to the light, a mesh of greenery and sunlight that will stay consistent throughout the film startles us. Jeanne (Emile Dequenne) lives with her mother (the reliable Frenchwoman Catherine Deneuve) in a cozy house outside Paris surrounded by shrubbery. Jeanne is a red-haired girl who likes to rollerblade, listens to music on her headphones and looks like she means mischief, chiefly because she does. She meets a sketchy boy in a thrift store named Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who cons a suitcase for her and takes her out for coffee. Jeanne is looking for a job for the summer, but just as she gains employment with a wealthy Jewish lawyer Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc), who has something of a romantic history with her mother, she decides to take a job guarding the warehouse of a friend of Franck’s. Because we know that Franck is no good, the situation cannot be good either. 

      This first half of the film (the film is divided in to two chapters) is a boisterous game of cinematic sleekness, both thematically and visually. When Franck tries to con Jeanne and her mother with a marriage proposal to Jeanne at dinner, the wall behind him is decorated as a false desert paradise scene. When Jeanne and Franck Skype with each other, their typed words are superimposed over their faces; her’s giddy, his selfish and distant. There is something in this renegade boy-girl love story that echoes Godard, and the various plot elements—Franck is an aggressive wrestler, Jeanne is something of a devious female and they get mixed up in a drug ring—suggest some teenage version of Film Noir. The most stunning piece of cinema in the whole film comes somewhere near the end of the first half; Franck and a junkie engage in a struggle in the warehouse ending with Franck getting stabbed in the stomach and the junkie running off with some drugs. It is shortly after this point, however, that director Andre Techniche (is it no mistake that his name sounds like “Technique?”) pulls the plug on genre and technique. The film becomes a fable about pathology, political incorrectness and the need (lust?) some people have for offending acts.

    The Girl on the Train is actually drawn from a true story about a French girl who made up a story about being attacked by a group of youths who believed she was Jewish. She was later forced to admit that she had lied, provoking outrage across the nation and in the media. But there is no sense in explaining how the zestful first half connects with this central plotline, in part because there is no explicit connection. It becomes beside the point; Techine wants to explore how humans are complicit in drawing themselves in to danger, and how they consciously perpetuate further danger for themselves and society. We know that Jeanne has a penchant for lying, but still we wonder; what is wrong with this girl? Techine and his screenwriters Odile Barksi and Jean-Marie Bassett appear to take the view that it is not society makes people think in such ways, but the individuals themselves. Jeanne is an individual who finds a certain hedonism in lying. Still, the second half collapses in on itself by the fact that we are witnessing a main character who is quirky and baffling from the outset become unlikeable and stupid as an outcome. The Jewish Question that Techine decides to bring in to the film feels forced and, yes, opportunistic. The film could have ended shortly after Jeanne sees her boyfriend get locked up and retained a certain vitality. But this is French cinema as we have it today; giving the tricks its old masters taught a good spin-around, yet stuck with modern obligations that filmmakers must somehow address. A fascinating film could be borne from this paradox, but The Girl on the Train is too desperate to ask some very big questions.

Youth in Revolt

Youth in Revolt is one of a number of films-- and television shows—that apparently is meant to evoke some sort of darkly comic and satirical world and ends up invoking a nightmarish, demented reality filled with people I wouldn’t go near even if I was wearing protective, anti-cynicism gear. The film could have been a Sundance winner, or a blockbuster, or any number of Hollywood comedies. It has it’s roots not so much in the foreign films it playfully deals with as in American Beauty and Fight Club: it is about a place (reality), which is funny and mock-able to a point, but ends up being vapid, uncaring and defeatist, because that’s what people are like anyway.

The film approaches us as a clever and outrageous take on the familiar premise of the dork who can’t seem to lose his virginity. Michael Cera plays that dork, named Nick Twisp here, a bored sixteen-year old suburbanite who lives with his flakey mother and her overweight boyfriend (Zach Galfinakis). Nick mainly prefers classic French films like Breathless to mainstream fare, and gets ridiculed for it. His voice-over narration betrays a sense of having cooled to the idea of humanity so long ago, it’s hard for him to even laugh at it; and in this sense the film is very honest in the way it fits voiceover with theme and content. Nick, his mother, and her boyfriend go to a lakeside retreat for the weekend where he meets a stunningly beautiful girl named Sheeny (Portia Doubleday), interested in all the same things he is and fed up with her Christian parents. Nick finds his optimism about his sexual inexperience rising. After he returns to his suburb, Nick sets about finding a way to move back to the lakeside retreat to be near Sheeny, even if there is the complication of her boyfriend, Trent. To get back out there, he will invent a suave French persona named Francois, who assists him in wrecking his mother’s ex-boyfriend’s car, so that his mother will kick him out of the house to go live with his father.

The rebellion implied in the title kicks in to high gear at this point, and it is a cinematic rebellion that bears some resemblance to—what else—certain Godard films in which the hero is on the run, the car is a central object, and the girl is always gotten; but not without a lot of postmodern cross-referencing to tag along. But while the parallels to Godard’s films are no doubt intentional, the tone of Youth in Revolt is not so much intellectually ballistic as it is rude, ironic and, well, predictable. Here we have a girl who acts so artificially hip and so teasing that we are ready to scold Nick for falling for her, beautiful as she is. Yet in Nick himself, we have a kid whose idea of revolt is to sedate his love with sleeping pills until she is expelled from her French-language boarding school. In his mother we have a woman unbearably trashy and self-centered and in Sheeny’s parents we have two obnoxious, shallow Christians. Grownups are a drag and kids are just unstable. The film depicts a world going to hell in a hand-basket, not an energized uprising.

Of course, you are meant to laugh at this. The film does manage to recognize the nightmarish of its humor to an extent. When Nick drives his car off a cliff only to crash it in to the shallow water below rather than sink it as he intended, the police on the other side see a confused kid wearing only boxers run up to the edge to see what has gone wrong, and it is an unexpected slapstick foible that manages to do the foibles that came before one better. And every scene with Fred Willard is a delight; as Nick’s hippy- activist neighbor who manages to get him out of one rough spot only to end up shirtless and zonked out on mushrooms later, Willard managed to squeeze a spirit in to the film that is not a pathetic caricature or a shallow pincushion; he is an earnest guy who is a total screw-up, in the great comic spirit that runs through Keaton and Sellers. Yet the other characters are not meant to amount to much, and as a result, the laughs may come up short or be stifled. This is a film that handles people callously, with cold hands. Perhaps this is best exemplified in the way that certain characters are picked up and then dropped, without any explanation or any sense that we should care; an Indian student whom Nick befriends and a grouchy girl who briefly helps him in his schemes are dropped off the storyline from a far greater height than Nick’s car was from the cliff. It’s also a great height to fall for American Comedies.