Truth on Trial
The Girl on the Train Directed by André Téchiné At IFC Center, The Beekman Theatre Runtime: 105 min.
America may not be ready for Andre Téchiné s superb new movie The Girl on the Train. To judge by the audiences gasp at the films Lincoln Center world premiere last year, Téchinés signature interest in how race, class and sex intersect is still shocking. When screenwriter Jean-Marie Besset revealed that The Girl on the Trains plot was based on New Yorks famous 1985 Tawana Brawley affair, here transposed to contemporary France, the middle-class spectators anxiety suggested that the Brawley rape cases issues were still discomfortingeven 20 years after Spike Lee memorialized the case with Do The Right Things wall of graffiti declaring "TAWANA TOLD THE TRUTH."
Téchiné always explores the Rashomon relativity of "truth" but with particular emphasis on the emotional and experiential differences that put characters in conflict. Again focused on contemporary youth, Téchiné observes a skateboarding white Parisian girl, Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) reacting to a personal calamity with a ruse that draws her single mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve), a family friend Samuel (Michel Blanc), the national media and even the President of France into her confusion. The turmoil begins with Jeannes deception that she was attacked on the subway by black and Muslim youth who mistake her for being Jewish. Instead of a banal lecture on bigotry, Téchiné offers a complex, sophisticated moral view. Dividing the story in two partsCircumstances and ConsequencesTéchiné and Jean-Marie Besset (who first presented the story as a stage play in Paris with timely domestic relevance) describe a multicultural, multigenerational France still sorting through issues of immigration and sexual identity that also distinguished Téchinés earlier films Les Innocents, Wild Reeds, Changing Times and The Witnesses.
Resisting a tabloid, pseudo-topical approach, Téchiné importantly identifies how Jeannes ruse got out of hand due to a media eager to exploit potential race sensationalism. This must be a global problem but Téchinés real concern is deeper: the complexities and mysteries that motivated Jeanne, propelling her out of iPod-wearing subjectivity into manipulating a political flashpoint. Besset subtly critiques the medias racist insensitivity in the Brawley case (there must be local French parallels) while precisely depicting a young age-groups political naivete. Jeanne, like Brawley, is an innocent yet typifies a generation without social or historical grounding. She falls in love with a young wrestler, Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), also from a broken home, who hustles through life with more guts than sensitivity. Hiding desperation and vulnerability behind arrogance, he appeals to impressionable Jeanne. Their Internet courtship is one of Téchinés first amazing tropes: the laptop images of their instant-messaging resemble hallucinatory projections; their boy-girl needs merge into cyberspace ephemera. It evokes kaleidoscopic solipsism like the teenagers in Wild Reeds yet perfectly expresses todays spiritual distance and disconnect.
This anxiety is suggested by the films motifs of hurtling commuter train and rollerblading propulsion. Theres hysteria even in the family life of Louises Jewish friend Samuel who tries uniting his globe-trotting son, his daughter-in-law and grandson (Jérémie Quaegebeur), a precocious young isolate like Jeanne whos unenthused about his upcoming bar mitzvah. The anxiety of family traditiona constant Téchiné themematches the difficulties of our post-colonial civilization. This truth is only a thread in the storys fabric but its visible through Téchinés masterful storytelling. No other filmmaker is as fleet or more probing. Characters spin through his story with their own complexes and disturbances that sometimes mirror each other and sometimes just excite our fascination and sympathy.
In Téchinés brisk narratives, momentous events fly byas in a great scene where Jeanne watches WWII atrocities on TV and cries, not simply about genocide but for her private despair. She links world misery with personal turmoil, equating past racism with current racial conditions. As The Girl on the Trains story shifts, ideas multiply, images movelike improvised life. Its a remarkable movement of thought far beyond the non-discourse that American media has on racesince the Brawley affair and especially in todays ultra-solipsistic, "post-racial" Obama era.
Téchinés social consciousness has often explored the mix of European and Muslim cultures in mostly Catholic Western France. Here, he bests American social dramatists by addressing the issue without using obvious ethnic focus. (Bleisteins urbane daughter-in-law bluntly advises "Try to avoid invoking the whole holocaust trauma. That makes us seem immune to other peoples suffering.") The Girl on the Train embraces the depth of other peoples suffering the way David Lean did in filming E.M. Forsters A Passage to India. It examines how racism is manifestedderived from both internalized insecurity, personal self-absorption and societal fear. Yet, its center is a proverbial instance of romantic heartbreak.
Like the heroine of Morrisseys "Black Cloud," Jeannes self-abasement reflects clumsy yearning ("I wanted to be loved and the opposite happens."). Not so much an analogy to the alien immigrants longing, to Téchinés credit it is a vivid expression of basic human need. Americans who are used to movies that play on fear and pathology are hereby called on to examine their hearts and minds.
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