French Cinema: The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER) (2009)

This story was taken from real life, so it isn't tied together in a neat bundle either at the beginning or at the end.  Somehow I can't really get a handle on this film except to describe it from beginning to end.  Maybe you should see the film first before you read my review.

Jeanne is a young woman, out of school but at loose ends, still living with her mother.  She kind of drifts through life without much purpose.  She tries to get a job as a legal secretary but she doesn't get the job, and it's really her fault she fails, since she prepared a bad resume, and lied during the interview and is not even a very good liar. 

In the meantime she wears her music headphones and roller blades here and there, taking a commuter train from her suburban home where here mother runs a kind of day care center.  The mother is pushing her gently to get up and do something with her life, which isn't really working.  Her mother persuades her to go for the legal secretary job with a prominent Jewish lawyer named Bleistein which fell through.  

Meanwhile she is hit upon by another rollerblader, a young man named Franck. 

He is serious about his career as a wrestler, and sports a colorful sleeve tattoo over his right arm.  After a couple of dates she moves in with him and is living happily, unsuspecting that the computer shop he is looking after is actually a front for dealing drugs.  Then things go wrong.  While washing his car, he is confronted by a drug buyer who will not take no for an answer and in the midst of the struggle he is stabbed and the buyer takes off with the drugs. 

She is oblivious about this illegal activity, comes home, discovers him bleeding on the floor and calls the police.  He is taken to the hospital, but it is clear to the police that he has been dealing drugs.  He realizes he will be in prison for a long time and breaks off the relationship, as he is pretty depressed about the prospect.

Her response to these reverses is pathological and makes no sense on the face of it.  She decides for some reason to make up a story about herself being a victim of an attack on the train, saying she was the victim of an anti-semitic attack by several youths since they found a card in her purse with "Bleistein" on it.  She is not herself Jewish.  She duly reports this to the police, and it causes a sensation.  Even the President of France calls to offer his sympathy. However there is a problem of course.  It never happened, and in the search for the perpetrators and reviewing the security tapes on the trains, it becomes clear that she is lying.

Bleisten, the lawyer.

At this juncture she and her mother are invited out for the weekend at the Bleistein's luxurious country home.  It is obvious to everyone in the family that she lied.  Her mother is an old friend of the Bleisteins, and this was the lawyer with whom she had originally applied for the job.    Now about the Bleistein family.   We have the grandfather who is the famous and successful lawyer.  His daughter works as his assistant in his office.  She is divorced from the father of their child, Nathan.  Nathan is turning thirteen on the brink of his bar mitzvah.  His father is some kind of filmmaker who returned from China to be present at his bar mitzvah.  Meanwhile Nathan is off exploring the bathroom and cuts himself on a razor in there.  You wonder what is going to happen to Nathan, but as it turns out nothing more than his glitzy bar mitzvah which we see eventually.  Nathan strides proudly along with phylacteries on his head, a prayer shawl and a Torah in his arms. His family and friends kiss their fingertips and touch the Torah.  Then everyone dances hand in hand.   Then the grandfather, part of this dance stops and seems short of breath at one point, and  you think maybe he is having a heart attack, but he doesn't have one, he's just out of breath.

At the Bleistein country home she is confronted and eventually agrees that she has lied. 

Mr. Bleistein helps her draft a statement of apology, and she turns herself in to the police.  She is given six months for making false statements to the police, but is detained only 48 hours while getting the rest of the time as probation, with the agreement to get some psychological counseling. 

After that she is, again seen roller blading through life, riding a train.   It seems that very little has changed in her internal landscape.  The lawyer, Bleistein, seizes the opportunity to write a book about the scandal caused.  He is seen meeting with Franck, who is serving his prison sentence, and getting background information from him.   Nathan sends Jeanne a love letter, although at 13 he's a bit young for her. 

At which I wonder at what I just saw.   It seems to be an illustration of how some people, and especially Jeanne just drift through life without giving anything much thought.    The story is unfocused, much as much of what happens to each of us in life is unfocused, with things happening to us which in the final analysis don't amount to much.  It is as though we are overhearing a conversation or events on a train, not knowing either the beginning of the end of someone else's personal drama.  

I guess it was a satisfying film in that it kept me watching it.     All these people are living their own lives and the wheels are turning in ways that maybe only they or only a small circle of people realize.  Like the moon on a cloudy night, most people are only visible in those moments when the clouds have passed, and their lives remain something of a mystery.