Andre Techine’s “The Girl on the Train” is the first narrative feature I’ve seen that deals with the problems of young people who are more comfortable online than they are in real life and who are still relying on “helicopter” parents into their 20s.
Techine is a French writer-director with a long list of credits going all the way back to 1969, but he has clearly stayed in touch with modern pop culture and the lifestyles of kids who grew up spending more time in front of a tube — and plugged into an iPod — than interacting with other people.
The “girl” of the title, Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne), is jobless when we meet her and living in a Paris suburb with her widowed mother, Louise (Catherine Deneuve), who makes her living taking care of the kids of working women in her neighborhood.
We follow Jeanne as she rather aimlessly looks for work and falls into a relationship with a handsome young man Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle) with dreams of wrestling at the Olympics.
Techine shows us that Jeanne’s closed-off lifestyle leaves her almost completely vulnerable to the influence of other people and what she sees on TV and the Internet. She also never leaves the house without her iPod attached to her ears — her own personal ever-present booming soundtrack distracts her from what is going on around her.
Louise looks for work for her daughter, prepares most of her query letters and resumes, and Jeanne goes through the motions with potential employers (on a job appointment with an important lawyer — an old friend of Louise’s — Jeanne’s detachment and inability to answer questions leaves her interviewer visibly perplexed).
“The Girl on the Train” gets steadily darker without ever feeling melodramatically contrived. The movie drifts into danger the same way Jeanne does when her new boyfriend takes a caretaking job and asks her to move in with him. The job is obviously fishy but Jeanne never questions the set-up until something terrible happens.
The movie gets even grimmer when the girl decides to earn some sympathy from her mother and the surrrounding community by making herself appear to be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack on the commuter train (she isn’t Jewish, but hears about a similar attack on TV and decides to use the scenario for herself without thinking it through).
Techine never creates false sympathy for his troubling protagonist, but we feel for her because she is so obviously unprepared for day-to-day life in the modern world.
The director keeps repeating shots of the commuter trains going in and out of the city, implying that girls like Jeanne are legion. The movie is French but the subject matter and the characters both feel very close to life in this country as well.
“The Girl on the Train” is playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan and is set to open in Connecticut soon. It is not to be missed.
