* * * *A lot of things to like in this film. La fille du RER has the engaging, off-center storyline I see often in Techine, oblique social observation, interesting film technique, a view of daily Paris and some of its ordinary residents, and the wonderful excess that I enjoy in so many of Techine’s films.
Once again, Techine starts his film in one direction with characters I like (the love story of Jeanne and Franck) then drops one of the characters half way though. And once we lose Franck, we watch Jeanne cope with this loss, her coping driving much of the rest of the film. Her response to losing Franck is to commit a major
hoax that becomes a national cause célèbre, so the movie shows how her intense, personal response to trauma drops her into a national debate she’s not even interested in. RER is at least partly an ironic view of how politics and media can use the pain of an individual who finds herself almost accidently at a fault line in her society. In RER, when Jeanne makes up her story about being beaten and called names, she becomes a locus of France’s worries about anti-Semitism and the nation’s ambivalence towards its Muslim citizenry; making such a film in the US, I’d chose a white girl who says she’s been attacked by a group of young black males for the same effect. RER looks at how Jeanne’s reaction to a very personal pain becomes a national affair. It’s a great central story.Although Jeanne’s story is central, Techine fills the film out with a group of other well-developed characters which include Jeanne’s mother and the family of the lawyer, Samuel Bleistein. The Bleistein family is an example of why I like the excess I get with Techine. We learn about Bleistein, his deadbeat son, his overbearing daughter-in-law and his nephew. All these characters, completely unnecessary to the main line of the story and not even related thematically, we learn about in some depth. In fact, the coming of age story of Alex and his crush on Jeanne is even further astray from the political story, though still touching. It’s an immense cinematic pleasure to have so much extra to enjoy in a Techine film.
RER, as the title suggests, also has an honesty about it. In the film, we see dormitories, suburban streets and public transportation. These Parisian settings are more quotidian than you’d see in a romanticized Paris film. Jeanne’s mother lives in a nice, ordinary house, and the car parts place that Franck and Jeanne live in is likewise typical. The home of the wealthy Bleistein is a sharp contrast to these more normal exteriors, harkening back to the
elegant Paris convention while adding to the range of RER.Last, I think there are some great cinematic moments here. There’s the Kurosawa tracking shot in several instances and the circling camera that films Jeanne and Franck as they rollerblade though the streets. One of the most technically-engaging sequences is the editing when Jeanne and Franck are engaged in online sex. This is certainly one of the best portrayals of that I’ve seen.
Overall, I completely enjoyed La fille du RER. It’s Techine at a peak.
