Slice of life. Unrated. 1 hour, 40 minutes. At the Chez Artiste.
“The Hedgehog” is a treat: a movie that’s smart, grown-up, wry and deeply moving. Best of all, this is accomplished with the lightest of cinematic strokes.
Based on Muriel Barbery’s bestselling 2006 novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” the story is much like the hedgehog itself, or at least like the way one of those creatures is described in the film: “falsely lethargic, staunchly private and terribly elegant.”
The feature debut of writer-director Mona Achache is also, superficially, a slow-moving thing. It centers on incremental changes in the relationships among three residents of a Paris apartment building: 11-year-old Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic); 54-year-old concierge Rene (Josiane Balasko); and Mr. Ozu (Togo Izawa), an elegant, 60-ish Japanese businessman.
Paloma is an artistically inclined soul who is making a documentary about her upper-middle-class family. Rene observes all, with a jaundiced eye, from her small rooms.
Each has a sour outlook on life. Paloma is disgusted with the hypocrisies of bourgeois life and has resolved to kill herself by her 12th birthday. (Or so she claims.)
Rene is a lonely, working- class widow whose gruff exterior hides a sensitive, self- taught aesthete. She’s the hedgehog of the title, prickly on the outside, refined on the inside. But Paloma has a bit of a tough hide, too.
Their friendships with Mr. Ozu — who sees through their facades — are transformative, filled with a quiet, almost wordless grace. The filmmaker doesn’t reveal these changes through dialogue or action as much as she does through glances and facial expressions.
“The Hedgehog” is about a lot of things: class consciousness, culture and the power of art. But mostly, it’s about the discovery that change is always possible and that it’s never too late to embrace love, or life.
