The Girl on the Train/ La Fille du Rer

Directed by André Téchiné. Starring Émilie Dequenne, Michel Blanc, Catherine Deneuve Club, IFI/Light House/Screen, Dublin, 105 min

THE LATEST film from André Téchiné deals with a notoriously incendiary hoax from recent French history. In 2004, a young woman reported that several men (all people of colour, significantly) had attacked her while she travelled on a suburban train.

Mistaking her for a Jew, the supposed anti-Semites scraped blades across her cheek and drew swastikas on her midriff. The police were, it seems, sceptical, but the media and politicians took every opportunity to wring their hands in public. Then it turned out that she had made it all up.

With characteristic obtuseness, Téchiné, one of the more severe post-Nouvelle Vague directors, holds the key incident back for a good 45 minutes. Fair enough, you may think. Placing the hoax in context can only add to our understanding of the protagonist’s motivations. But the opening act of the film offers few real insights into the anatomy of young Jeanne’s strange meltdown. She lives a faintly aimless existence with her mother (Catherine Deneuve, miscast as an ordinary human being), who runs a daycare centre in one of Paris’s duller, less chic suburbs.

One day Jeanne, played with drab confidence by Émilie Dequenne, applies for a job with a radical lawyer – once mum’s lover – who does, indeed, work in the area of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, she makes a hash of the interview and finds herself eased back to a life of rollerblading and dossing. She falls for an arrogant wrestler, but he turns out to be something of a trouble magnet. And so on.

Téchiné utilises some nifty aural flourishes to tell his half-story. He allows the same surge of chords by Philippe Sarde to well up at random moments. Trains rattle angrily through sombre tunnels. The tapping of computer keys drowns out all ambient noise. The effect is impressively alienating. If Téchiné’s intent is to emphasise the withdrawn fecklessness of a certain class of confused youth, then he undoubtedly succeeds.

Mind you, his apparent disdain for his younger characters (in contrast to his respect for older, more bourgeois types) does suggest that the former rebel is fast becoming a grumpy old homme.Interesting stuff, nonetheless.