In 2004, a woman called Leonie Leblanc claimed, even though she wasn’t a Jew, that she had been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack by a group of Africans on board a train just outside Paris. The event sparked a media furore with the French President offering his support and Ariel Sharon urging Jews to leave for Israel to ‘escape the wildest anti-Semitism’. It soon emerged that the event was fiction. Andre Techine takes inspiration from this event for The Girl on the Train, but the brilliance of the movie lies in the way it narrates the very private worlds that get caught up in these larger debates. Jeanne, whose company is mostly just herself, though initially resistant, coyly yields to a young wrestler’s advances. A whole world of living individuals is created around her, yet she seems to have hardly any contact with most of them – even with her supportive mother, played powerfully by Catherine Denevue. In such a world, one reached only through its fictions, reaching out can have disastrous consequences. Yet, even though the movie conjures up capturing narratives, some other narratives, or odd scenes, stick out a bit oddly – making it more a collection of wonderful pieces and moments, rather than one organically stringed feature.
In comparison I found Romanian director Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World very well knit – all the more remarkable given the slower pace of the movie. The movie is structured by repeated attempts to shoot a commercial, weaving around it the stories of three individuals variously involved in the process. It gradually emerges that Delia has won a car by posting some juice labels and her parents desperately want to sell it off – hence the journey to the city. Beginning from the friendly, but casual greeting after such a long journey, to the brisk hands doing the make-up, to being shouted at by younger people – the rural family soon realise they have entered a different place, yet one in which they can shout back. They can both be surprised at Delia’s failure to perform the scene to perfection at one go – ‘they want to give her a Logan and she won’t listen to them!’ – and insist on hovering around the sets to give their own directions. Jude’s movie paints a moving picture of the people behind the commercial – the happiest girl might not have the money to maintain her prize.
