The girl in Andre Techine’s “The Girl on the Train” is Jeanne, who has never fully engaged in the society she occupies. She Rollerblades through French suburbs with her iPod blocking out other sounds, as the world glides past unobserved. Was it the job interview with the lawyer Bleistein that put Jews into her mind? One doubts she had given them, or anything else, much thought.
Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne) is sent to Samuel Bleistein by her mother, Louise (Catherine Deneuve). He was once in love with her. One of the nation’s most powerful lawyers, he makes time to see the girl because of old memories. His secretary pages through her resume and observes there isn’t much there. Nor does the interview itself go well. Jeanne doesn’t know much, hasn’t done much, doesn’t even realize how little she’s done or what there is to be known. She lives in a cocoon of electronic distraction.
She doesn’t care. She’s having a romance with a young athlete, a wrestler, tattooed and a little strange. They break up. Now she’s jobless, alone, and with her mother on her case. Louise, who provides home care for toddlers, works in the garden, and is gentle enough with her — but anything that interrupts Jeanne’s reverie is annoying.
For no particular reason, perhaps hoping to win Bleistein’s sympathy, perhaps not, perhaps she doesn’t know, she makes up a false story of being assaulted on a train by North Africans who taunted her as a Jew, beat her, and carved a swastika on her stomach. She isn’t Jewish, not that it’s a point. The case becomes a national scandal. The French president can’t get on the phone fast enough to express his sympathy and solidarity.
The police are not as sympathetic because there is absolutely no evidence to back up her claims. No witnesses, no evidence on security cameras — and why is the swastika drawn backward? Well, it can be difficult for the inexperienced. I don’t know if I could draw one correctly.
These events occupy the first movement of the film, titled “Circumstances.” The second is titled “Consequences,” and is really the reason for the first. It deals more fully with Bleistein (the shortish, quite bald Michel Blanc) and his family: his son, Alex (Mathieu Demy); and son’s wife, Judith (Ronit Elkabetz); and their child, Nathan (Jeremy Quaegebeur), who is preparing for his bar mitzvah.
The movie seems likely to be about anti-Semitism, but that’s more the occasion than the subject. Bleistein gets involved in the case, sees there is nothing to do, doesn’t consider Jeanne’s lie a case of anti-Semitism so much as a case of utter cluelessness.
Within his family, tensions uncoil that are typical of all families. What the film is really about is social embarrassment, and Bleistein’s clear- headed, calm understanding that his old friend has a stupid daughter who has caused fraudulent trouble for a great many people.
The story, I understand, is based on a real French case not long ago. I can think of two similar cases — Tawana Brawley, the black girl who said she was attacked by whites, and Ashley Todd, who scratched a B on her face and made up a story that a black man robbed her and was angered by her John McCain sticker.
Do these stories inspire others? Do dim TV viewers see them and come away with the impression that such stories inspire sympathy? Are they hungry for attention? Who knows? The perpetrators don’t inspire much interest, but the effects do: How the media handle them, how politicians jump aboard, how false incidents reveal real racism.
“the girl on the train.” ***
Not rated. 1 hour, 41 minutes. Directed by Andre Techine. Screenplay by Techine, Odile Barski and Jean-Marie Besset, based on the play “RER,” by Besset. Starring Emilie Dequenne, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Blanc, Ronit Elkabetz, Mathieu Demy. Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
