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Telling tall tales brings perils all of their own in this drama from the French director André Téchiné. Michael Brooke reports how Téchiné consistently avoids the obvious in this work inspired by true life events.

A potent illustration of the dangers both of amour fou and of deceit's invariably tangled webs, The Girl on the Train is named after Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne), a twentysomething would-be secretary whose mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve) despairs of her aimlessness and tries to secure her a respectable job - such as working for her old flame Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc), now a powerful lawyer. But Jeanne prefers to move in with a tattooed wrestler, oblivious of his criminal connections, and when that relationship goes disastrously wrong, she fakes a racially-charged assault which pushes so many symbolic buttons that it becomes a media and even Presidential cause célèbre before she fully realises the implications of what she's done. 

Although he was inspired by real-life events and divides his film into two apparently didactic chapters headed 'Circumstances' and 'Consequences', Téchiné consistently avoids the obvious: a seemingly irrelevant subplot about Bleistein's family and his grandson's bar mitzvah ends up being pivotal to the film's subtle, probing questions about identity and the need for a sense of self.

 

Michael Brooke on 26th August 2010
View all 106 of Michael Brooke's reviews