The Girl on the Train

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

STATION-TO-STATION: Émilie Dequenne plays a spurned woman who claims to be the victim of a hate crime in André Téchiné's latest.

Drawn from a sensational real-life incident, André Téchiné's The Girl on the Train falls deliberately, if not always gracefully, between two stools.

The movie begins in solid Téchiné territory, with the blossoming of a mildly inexplicable and evidently doomed romance between Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne), whose lack of direction is embodied in her constant Rollerblading, and Franck (Nicholas Duvauchelle), a headstrong thug whose aggression she takes for charm. Over the disapproval of her mother (Catherine Deneuve), who runs a day care out of their modest house, the two shack up following a steamy webcam flirtation, then crash and burn as only young lovers can.

What happens next comes as an abrupt shock, although it likely wasn't so for French viewers, who would be intimately familiar with the movie's antecedent, the 2004 episode in which a 23-year-old woman falsely claimed to have been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack by a gang of non-white youths. Neither Jeanne nor the real-life fabricator are Jewish, but that didn't stop public officials from the president on down rushing to their side. The potential for satire, a kind of hate-crime Ace in the Hole, is ripe, which may be why the elliptical Téchiné skips it altogether, focusing exclusively on the personal ramifications, both for Jeanne and for the Jewish son (Jérémy Quaegebeur) of Deneuve's old flame, whose bar mitzvah is fast approaching.

Téchiné's choice of zag over zig certainly succeeds in upending the audience's expectations, although it's not clear to what end. Jeanne's rationale — "I wanted to be loved" — hardly seems sufficient, although that may be the point. Dequenne, best known for the Dardennes' Rosetta, is sublimely opaque, her emotions foreign to her and us but lingering just beyond the threshold of vision. Notwithstanding his 67 years, Téchiné has an unerring instinct for the inarticulate passions of youth, and the unforeseen directions to which they lead.