All French women are gorgeous and in all honesty I have a hard time watching a French film these days without falling in love with the lead starlet. Oh - and then there's Catherine Deneuve. There are no words do describe her magnificence. Now at 66, she remains on of the screens most gorgeous, most talented actors.
I realized after I got out of The Girl on the Train that my appreciation for Deneuve and the lead, Emilie Dequenne (hubba hubba), probably colored my view of the piece overall. It is a good movie, but there are some major problems with the script. Director and co-writer Andre Techine does a very nice job introducing stylized elements and music into the piece, but the story meanders in unnecessary directions until it finally settles on the real point at the end of the second act.
In the film, (which was based on a true story) young Jeanne lives at home with her mother in the Paris suburbs. She's totally beautiful and men hit on her constantly. One day on the train she meets a guy who sweeps her off her feet. He's a collegiate wrestler, is good looking and seems to have a good head on his shoulders. The two fall in love and move into a room over a garage where he gets a job as the night watchman. It soon comes out that the garage is a front for drug runners and when the boyfriend gets into trouble, Jeanne's life spins out of control.
Meanwhile, she and her mother are concerned about a rash of anti-Semitic attacks occurring on the RER train (they're Catholic, not Jewish, but they're still interested). The lawyer involved in these infractions is an old flame of Deneuve - and a rich an powerful man now. As her life begins to fall apart, Jeanne cuts and hits herself to claim that she too was attacked on the train because a group of youths thought she was Jewish. This brings the two old lovers back together to get to the bottom of the girl's story.
The problem is that there are about six movies buried in here. There is a story about Deneuve and her ex-beau-cum-rich-Jewish-lawyer; there is a story about a mother nagging her daughter about getting her life in order; there is a story about a young couple in love and things going bad for them; there is a story about the Jewish lawyer's son being a disappointment to him. It's just too much and not tight enough.
Techine has a really beautiful style (I also liked The Witnesses from 2008 as well). He uses pop music very well throughout, stopping the action to show people dancing to the radio (somewhat similar to what Cedric Klapisch does as well). There are a lot of stylized elements used throughout that are nice to see. This is a nice change, I think, from the very style-less, script-focused films that have come out of France in recent years (see: The Christmas Tale and The Summer Hours, both of which are virtually anonymous).
I think with a re-tooled scrip this could have been a really great movie. Instead it's good, but not great... except for the female actors who look amazing.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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Roger Ebert was a trailblazer in acknowledging how being sexually attracted to movie stars was a deeply embedded part of movie-going and appreciation of films. (How else to explain my seeing Cocktail. Twice.) I remember fact-checking an interview of Catherine Deneuve by a female writer who wrote that Deneuve "was so beautiful, I had to turn away." So true.
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