The Girl on The Train (Andre Techine, 2009)

She's not all there. There's a faraway and wistful look in the eyes of young Parisienne Jeanne Fabre, and it scarcely seems to be one of aspiration. When the camera follows her around the city in Andre Techine’s The Girl on the Train, she seems to be a study of youth misspent. There is little to indicate what yearnings, or perhaps sorrows, inhabit her mind, and even when she rollerblades across the city, there is on her face, the perpetual gaze of abstraction. Taking her time to look for jobs, she mysteriously eschews the ones that answer her resume. It’s not as though she lacks her mother’s wisdom and supportive presence. Au contraire. Even when she finds love, it hardly seems enough a catalyst to awaken her from a perpetual reverie. “Learn to open your eyes,” someone soon advises her.

Based on events that made news headlines in France in July 2004, Techine’s latest film draws on the hoax perpetrated by a 23-year-old woman named Marie-Léonie Leblanc who, in an apparent effort to gain attention, claimed to have been attacked by black and Arab youths on a Parisian train. It was a hoax that touched a nerve across a country reeling from a string of anti-Semitic attacks. In The Girl on the Train, we vaguely sense the public outrage, but what is writ larger are a young woman’s ill-advised choices and her galvanization from a mysterious trance.

The Girl on the Train is structured as a diptych, two halves carrying utilitarian titles, the first half being the “Circumstances” and the second “Consequences.” Far from assuming a documentary approach, Techine lenses his material with the same poetic sensibility and delicacy that grace his previous mature work (The Thieves, The Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season). “Circumstances” traces the fictionalized moments of Jeanne’s life that might help explain why she committed the hoax. What essentially unravels her is the repudiation by her boyfriend, a promising Olympian wrestler who is faced with a lengthy prison sentence because of her. “Consequences” encapsulates the moments after the hoax, the gathering together of Jeanne’s suddenly extended family, her mother and mother’s friends – mainly a Jewish lawyer and his family whom Jeanne involves in her hoax – to let her see the error of her ways. It is the adolescent Nathan, the young grandson of Bleistein, who sees through her, a kindred spirit.

The young Belgian actress, Émilie Dequenne, who played the down-and-out working class girl in the Dardenne Brothers’ Rosetta, essays enigmatic yearnings to perfection as the eponymous character. Catherine Deneuve, as Jeanne’s mother, is a strong but unobtrusive presence, ready to enlist everyone’s help and swallow her pride to see her child through. Michel Blanc, as the Jewish lawyer Bleistein, is a strong ballast who shrewdly knows the bigger picture borne out of the consequences.

Throughout Techine’s film runs a recurrent motif that reveals one of its inspirations: the musical theme to Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie. Both films, true enough, are unconventional character studies of young, embattled women. While Nana in Godard’s film meets with a fatalistic and perhaps cynical end, a prostitute’s cold-blooded death, however, Jeanne is not beyond redemption. The Girl on the Train professes, as in many previous Techine pictures, the power of familial bonds. Love redeems, and it cuts across all barriers.

Not as evidently strong and coherent as Techine’s masterpieces (The Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season), The Girl on the Train is a work that makes more sense with retroactive appreciation. It’s a film that hints and suggests as much as tells its story. If nothing else, it yet again confirms the filmmaker’s fascination with women, a long-standing one borne out in more than three decades of filmmaking. The Bad Girl, Strayed, The Thieves, and The Bronte Sisters are pictures that foreground the subjectivity of women, a subjectivity that paradoxically avoids eliciting facile judgments. Here lies the strange redemptive power of Andre Techine’s brand of cinema.

Ma Saison Préférée (André Téchiné, 1993)

Here is one French film that deserves to be seen by Filipino audiences who are looking for something new. André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée (My Favorite Season) will surprise and confound those of us who still relish the old Filipino paradigm of family dramas – the overwrought, oversentimental, overdramatized kind. Téchiné’s film, instead, depicts a portrait of a dysfunctional family without the emotional and cathartic excesses. Family tensions and antagonisms here are played out with such grace and elegance that one comes away from it with warm, ennobled feelings.

André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée, a film about cherished memories and idealized pasts, is also a film about misrecognitions: we don’t see from one set of lenses, and therefore don’t see identically. In Téchiné’s shorthand, the seasons simply stand for memory’s mnemonics. Summer beguiles the film’s characters, middle-aged siblings, Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) and Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), for instance, not for the warmth of the sun and days in the park, but for something each of them alone knows.

Some of this film's characters, however, cling too fiercely to their shared memories, jealously guarding not just these memories but those with whom they experienced those special moments – to the point of everyone else’s exclusion. At such times, these memories verge on the obsessive, verge on murking their pure waters.

Such memories, such ties, tangled and obsessive, lie at the heart of Téchiné’s film. It starts with a premise that seems harmless enough: a family gathering around a mother’s incipient old age and widowhood, but it’s a family, as the story unfolds, freighted with curious bonds.

As Berthe is adopted into daughter Emilie's home when the former is no longer able to look after herself, Berthe seems naturally ill at ease in her new home. Things hint at the unseemly, however, as Emilie finds Berthe muttering to herself in the dark at ungodly hours of the night. Is it her infirmities, her new home, that make her an unsettled member of the household? When Antoine, Berthe's youngest son, visits for Christmas, however, this rekindles the tight-knit closeness between Emilie and Antoine. Berthe, on the other hand, only seems to respond to Antoine, to the detriment of Emilie and her family. Family romance, yes – in a way.

Emilie, a prospering lawyer, and Antoine, a brain surgeon, are seemingly well-adjusted professionals on the surface. But the quirks soon start to show: we find Antoine muttering to himself in the restroom a stream of mantras redolent of psychoanalysis. While Emilie vents her unsettled, sexual emotions on a stranger on a park bench. Emilie and Antoine are in the thick of reevaluating their relationship, their unusual closeness borne out of an intimate childhood. Emilie seems more sure of what it all means, but Antoine seems to value it differently. He seems to dance attendance around her at every chance. And perhaps it explains why Antoine doesn’t see eye to eye with Emilie’s husband.

Berthe, on the other hand, seems only receptive to her own children. There is a brief sequence towards the end when the three are together on the road and they recreate their happy journeys in childhood, Emilie and Antoine singing humourous nursery songs. They go on along their magical itinerary, retrieving their magical past. Family romance, yes – in a way.

Ma Saison Préférée adroitly and tastefully renders Antoine and Emilie’s potentially incestuous relationship. Writer-director André Téchiné sidesteps a polemical outcome with assured subtle and lyrical direction, mixing solemn and comic moments. (His light touch gives this film a funny sense of gallows humor at times, as evidenced by Antoine’s suicide attempt.) Téchiné's relish for unorthodox relationships, as films like The Wild Reeds would bear out, is in evidence yet again. Ma Saison Préférée, despite its delicate theme, ends with warm, rarefied feelings. All without the emotional manipulation and exhaustion we are accustomed to.