'The Girl on the Train' is graced with a sensitive performance by Emilie Dequenne in the lead role as Jeanne. As her story unfolds, it reveals how life's apparent randomness conceals deeper patterns. At the outset, Jeanne is a roller-blading enthusiast living with her mother in the suburbs of Paris. Looking for work, Jeanne applies for a position with a Jewish lawyer, Bleistein, a former admirer of her mother's - but she prepares badly, tells fibs and is caught out. After this setback, Jeanne impulsively hooks up with a roller-blading tattooed wrestler, Frank, and they soon become lovers.

Some time later a friend of Frank's asks the pair to house-sit an apartment above his electronics business while he's away on vacation. Unknown to Jeanne, the business is a drug-dealing front and Frank is in on the deal. Before too long, Frank is seriously wounded by a buyer, and as a consequence the two lovers are both arrested. Despite facing a long sentence, Frank convinces the police of Jeanne's innocence - but blames her for his bad luck and coldly ends their relationship. Jeanne's response to this rejection is somewhat extreme. She gives herself some shallow cuts and daubs a Nazi swastika on her body in a mirror, before claiming that she'd been mistaken for a Jew, and attacked by some anti-semitic thugs. Her story creates a press sensation, but soon falls apart when the police scrutinize her account. Jeanne stubbornly refuses to recant, so her mother contacts Bleistein to help clear up the mess. The two women pay a visit to the lawyer's country home, and after a stormy night of self-examination, Jeanne decides to face the music - whereupon she receives a light sentence and roller-blades off into an unknown future.

Director Techine punctuates the action with imagery of trains and roller-blades - the trains speeding doggedly through the suburbs on their way to fixed destinations - whereas Jeanne meanders through parks on her roller-blades, her life lacking both direction and goal. 'The Girl on the Train' should be interpreted as an esoteric parable of liberation. Jeanne is imprisoned by time and place, but she's on the verge of freedom. She lives in a world where everybody lies to her for their own convenience or advantage - and her alienation from society is a reflection of her discomfort with its pervasive mendacity. She has become infected with this sickness - and what is destroying her, must be the cure. Using the same strategy as Sarah Woodruff in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', Jeanne marks herself with blood and a sacred symbol (a Sanskrit swastika) for her rite of passage, and then fabricates an absurd racist assault in order to disgrace herself - knowing she will be disbelieved and dishonored - thereby liberating herself from society's norms. By the film's conclusion Jeanne has swapped roles with the Jewish lawyer - a bourgeois outsider with his family torn apart by disputes over empty rituals - and transformed herself into the wandering Jew of her unbelievable tale. She has been through the fire, acknowledged her mistakes, accepted her penance and is roller-blading through life armed with self-realization. She has vanquished her lower self, and become one of Joseph Campbell's Heroes with a Thousand Faces.

André Téchiné's 'The Girl on the Train' (La fille du RER) focuses on a naive girl Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) who fabricates a story about being attacked on a suburban Paris train by black and Arab youths who supposedly mistook her for a Jew. The story is based on a real event that took place in France in 2004, adapted for the stage by Jean-Marie Besset as 'RER', and written for the screen by Besset, Odile Barski, and director Téchiné. Téchiné, stating that 'the story became the mirror of all French fears, a revelation of what we call the 'collective unconscious.' How an individual's lie is transformed into truth with respect to the community at large and its fears', 'The Girl on the Train' dissects the psychological circumstances and consequences surrounding a bold lie in a rich drama, concentrating on the permutations such an act has one all concerned.

Jeanne lives with her single mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve) who manages the family finances as a childcare provider. Jeanne spends the greater part of her time roller skating and it is on one of her excursions that she meets the rather mysterious Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle),a young wrestler who immediately attempts to win Jeanne's attention and affection despite Jeanne's insecurities. They eventually respond to the mutual chemistry and Franck searches for a way to help Jeanne out of financial difficulties: they become caretakers in a warehouse home, which is unbeknownst to Jeanne, a drug trafficking site. An incident occurs when a 'buyer' shows up and Franck is stabbed in defending his caretaker job and Jeanne's future. Jeanne is distraught but when she visits Franck in the hospital, Franck blames Jeanne for his bad luck and rebuffs her - he must now serve prison time for his involvement in the drug game.

Now, torn between her loss of money, her new 'home', and the love of Franck, Jeanne plans a manner of striking back: she slices her skin, clips her hair, and paints swastikas on her abdomen and reports that she has been attacked by anti-Semites. Louise seeks the assistance of an old flame who is now the important Jewish lawyer Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc) - man with whom Jeanne had unsuccessfully interviewed for a job - and what Louise thought would be a protection for both Franck and Jeanne results in Jeanne's confession that she fabricated the entire incident, a factor that disrupts the lives of all those affected by the lie, especially the family of Bleistein already teetering on disintegration due to the rocky marriage of his son and daughter-in-law and the preparation for the grandson's contested Bar Mitzvah.

Téchiné knows how to take seemingly ordinary people and circumstances and show the profound effect of evil wherever it raises its head. The film is enhanced by the verismo photography by Julien Hirsch and the apropos musical score by Philippe Sarde. While this film is not quite up to the standards of Téchiné's films such as 'Wild reeds', 'My Favorite Season', 'Changing Times' or 'Strayed', it still maintains that realistic surface beneath which lies the real grit of life. In French with English subtitles.

Grady Harp

The Girl on the Train (2009)

The hook that made this movie successful is not enough to make the movie good. The added plot in the first half fizzles and seems ultimately irrelevant. Yes, the main actress plays the part of an "airhead," as the subtitle translates her stupidity. But the movie itself has some of the same disease. It lacks formal intelligence, and it stretches out a few basic ideas over 105 minutes, posing as a serious movie with serious implications.

Not that it's misery to watch. In a way, the fact that you get sucked in waiting and waiting for some basic conflict to formulate says something about the acting and editing. This is contemporary Paris, or a cozy, idealized side to it. And you can't dismiss the theme of anti-Semitism, which gets some elaboration and complexity as you go, including some great, if simplified, conversations between Jews at their country house about what it means to be a contemporary Jew. It's conveniently packaged, but adds some needed interest to the events.

This leads eventually to a rather long and oddly placed bar mitzvah celebration, and some more roller blading filler. It's a frustrating thing to see all this content watered down by a single turn of events, the faked hate crime attack, which happens well past the halfway point of the movie. And around which the suspense of being fooled is left out of the movie, because we are told everything as it happens.