The Hedgehog or Le hérisson (2009)

film

Inspired by the name of a film called The Hedgehog or Le hérisson (2009), I offer the following alternatives: Fish Called Lazarus or The Revenge of the Dry Cleaners (after all, Roland Barthes was run down by a laundry van). Abandoning this somewhat flippant approach, this is a sadly moving and beautifully observed meditation on the obsessive self-interest people develop when they are unhappy. They wrap themselves in their despair and try to hide themselves away. As in all meditations, this film requires people to speak to each other because, through the words, they have a chance to see into each other’s mind. Some insightful person once said the eyes are the window to the soul. It’s been so popular, we’ve adopted it as an idiom. But it was Hiram Powers who added the equally revealing words, “. . .the mouth the door.” The essence of this film is a simple truth. Sometimes a bare minimum of words, carelessly exchanged, can say too much or just enough, depending on your point of view. For the record, the film is based on the novel, L’élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery which is fascinating in its own right.

Josiane Balasko and Garance Le Guillermic

 

One of the eight luxury flats in this Parisian building has been left vacant thanks to the previous occupant’s sudden heart attack. As the new Japanese tenant, Kakuro Ozo (Togo Igawa) is being introduced to Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko), the consierge, he asks about the Josse family, one of the other tenants. He’s told that the family is unhappy. Without pausing for thought, Renée adds, “Happy families are all alike. . .” He recognises this as being from Anna Karenina, and surprises her by completing it, “. . .but each unhappy family is unique.” (depending on the translation, the end of the quote can be, “. . .but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — however you translate it, the meaning is essentially the same). Since she has also admitted the name of her cat is Leo (as in Leo Tolstoy), Kakuro immediately assumes she’s a kindred spirit. As an outsider, he looks beyond the role she occupies as a lowly consierge and sees an immensely cultured woman hiding beneath the drab exterior.

 

Later, the consierge explains the situation to Paloma Josse (Garance Le Guillermic), an eleven-year-old manic depressive in the making, who has decided to kill herself on her twelfth birthday. So long as she conforms to the archetype of a consierge, our “old” lady will be able to hide in plain sight. So every morning, she switches on her television (leaving the sound at its lowest setting so it will not disturb her while she reads). She’s surly to all-comers and, when she’s in the mood, she contrives to fill the entrance hall with the aroma of cassoulet — a hearty peasant casserole dish featuring beans. This means she’s socially invisible in this block of luxury apartments. No-one rich will admit to seeing, let alone actually talking with, such a socially inferior person. Because of her grumpy personality, no-one will dare disturb her unless it’s unavoidable. Hence, Paloma confers the nickname of the Hedgehog — prickly on the outside and sweet once inside the defences.

Togo Igawa delivers a quiet and restrained performance, full of humanity

 

Indeed, as Paloma counts down towards the day of her suicide, she finds herself drawn to spend time with Madame Michel. In some senses, they are good for each other. The consierge was married but childless. Her husband died of cancer fifteen years earlier. In her loneliness, she’s hidden herself away, surrounded by hundreds of books and videos of classic films from around the world. Paloma is a member of a dysfunctional family. Her father is successful, her mother is in therapy. Her sister is in love and deeply embarrassed by her family. And Paloma? She thinks no-one will miss her if she slips away. The only question is what she should be doing on the day she dies. For her, this is a vital question. Death cannot be just a tawdry event. It must have meaning. To complete the background information, Kakuro’s wife also died of cancer and he’s deeply lonely. He befriends Paloma and they play Go (which Paloma rightly says was invented by the Chinese some two thousand years ago). The child is a kind of bridge between the adults although Kakuro would have tried to befriend Renée anyway.

 

The question we’re to consider as this drama unfolds is culturally complex. When an outsider asks, can a hermit suddenly leave the “cave” and re-enter the world? She has been cutting her own hair and never wears make-up. She has no clothes other than those required to protect her modesty and allow her to move the rubbish bins around without getting too dirty. Worse, she’s out of the habit of talking with and to people. Since her husband died, she’s deceived herself into thinking she’s worthless so she can act the part convincingly. In this, she not only considers herself. How can she been seen with others when it may cause them embarrassment? These are not questions that can be answered quickly or easily. They go to the heart of what a person has chosen to become and the extent to which society is flexible enough to allow people to step outside their declared roles and become something different.

Togo Igawa and Garance Le Guillermic avoid being upstaged by the cats

 

In this film, ignoring cause and effect, there’s a death. It occurs on the day the person decided it was safe to love again. That’s what makes this film a tragedy. The meaning one draws comes from the affection exchanged before the death. Without that exchange, there would have been no sense of loss in those left behind. They would not have appreciated the need for life to go on, that there can be hope for the future despite the fact people you know and love fall by the wayside. The Hedgehog or Le hérisson (2009) has been a long time in finding its way to my door. It’s beautiful in its simplicity, direct in its honesty and deeply moving in the end. Despite the faults you would find in anyone eleven-years old and her adopted eccentricities, Paloma moves serenely onwards to her appointment with death. It will be a waste to lose someone as intelligent and artistically talented, but that’s her decision. Kakuro finds he misses his wife most on ceremonial occasions like his birthday. And our Hedgehog realises she cannot always hide behind her books and find peace of mind. In all this, the simple piano music provided by Gabriel Yared gently counterpoints what’s happening on the screen, while the deft hand of Mona Achache provides the screenplay and her direction offers understated brilliance.This is a delightful film you should go out of your way to see.

 

Delicacy or La délicatesse (2011)

film

Do people really organise their lives on the basis of what they see others do? When in the market for a girlfriend, I always looked around my circle of acquaintance to see if there was anyone I could talk with. I didn’t sit in a café thinking, “If she orders an apricot juice, I’ll go and ask her for sex.” Obviously, I’m not French enough to appreciate the true significance of apricot juice. Anyway, coming to Delicacy or La délicatesse (2011) this explains how François (Pio Marmaï) picks up Nathalie Kerr (Audrey Tautou). When he approaches her in the café, she says, “I could hear you thinking from here. Have a sip of my juice.” And, before you can say, “Antidisestablishmentarianism”, they are married. She’s given a job by Charles (Bruno Todeschini) because he fancies his chances of getting her into bed. All his plans are, however, put on hold when François is inconveniently mown down while out jogging. So, as in all cases involving tragic death in French films, our heroine goes into mourning overdrive. In the good old days, women in her situation would retreat into a convent to escape the world. Today, these women just bury themselves in their work and keep one friend, Sophie (Joséphine de Meaux) with whom they can share what’s left of their lives. Except, on this occasion, we have a reprise of the old Beauty and the Beast trope.

Audrey Tautou looking every inch a with-it manager

 

As a somewhat less than physically attractive man, I’ve always been interested in the screen fantasy of a beautiful young woman falling for me. Fortunately, in my eyes, my wife is very beautiful so, if she should ever read this review, I hope that let’s me off the hook. But in this film, the object of the beautiful Nathalie’s attention proves to be Markus Lundl (François Damiens), a balding bloke from Sweden. He’s older and, despite the occasional early morning run, already starting to carry an excess of weight. Sadly, there’s little spark about him. He’s just so dull he would drag our heroine down rather than inspire her to rise out of her despair like a phoenix. If you were thinking about this in football terms, it would be like Manchester United suddenly deciding it wasn’t going to play any more after Sir Alex Ferguson’s unexpected death. Then, some three years later, Wayne Rooney gets a team of players from the glory days together again. When word is released, there are offers of exhibition matches from Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. After careful thought, Rooney decides to play a friendly against Macclesfield. Yet it’s an incongruity of this magnitude that’s supposed to give this film enough charm to warm the cockles of hearts around the world. Indeed, standing looking at the Eiffel Tower, Markus says Nathalie is like America and he’s Liechtenstein. I happen to think is very unkind to Liechtenstein which is the world’s largest producer of false teeth and a tax haven of great renown.

François Damiens as every woman's dream man

 

So, one day, Nathalie opens a desk drawer at work and sees the car keys François used as a surrogate engagement ring. When she looks up and sees Markus, she moves over to him and gives him a long lingering kiss. Afterwards, she claims not to remember doing it. This is a symptom of a major psychological illness. After three years of living like a nun, she would never kiss a random man unless in a dissociative state that disrupts awareness and memory, and produces involuntary behaviour. Indeed, when she and Charles later have an argument about her relationship with Markus and he mentions François, she goes into a fugue state, leaving the office in a daze and going “away”. When she recovers her sanity, she finds herself alone in a car in the countryside near where he grew up as a child. Naturally, she calls Markus to her, dresses him in her grandfather’s clothes and tries to make babies with him in her grandmother’s spare bedroom.

Bruno Todeschini as every woman's dream boss

 

At this point, this film just stops. It’s completely incredible. We needed to see the consequences. Naturally, Nathalie was fired for walking out of the office and losing the contract on a job she’s been working on nonstop for three months. Markus was fired because Charles was pathologically jealous. Sophie, who was a closet gay despite marrying and having a daughter (see her eyes as she watches Nathalie dance and then take the first opportunity to humiliate Markus in front of all her friends), killed Markus in a murder-suicide attack because she couldn’t stand to lose Nathalie to a boring Swedish bloke. And after being denied the right to bring up Sophie’s child as her own, Nathalie finally did retreat into a convent.

 

A good opening few minutes establishing the happiness between Nathalie and François is completely wasted by David Foenkinos who wrote the original novel and the screenplay (nominated for the César Awards 2012), and his brother Stéphane Foenkinos who shared the directing credits (both nominated as first-time directors for the César Awards 2012). Watching a woman have a mental breakdown is not my idea of entertainment. Of course, I may be completely wrong. Many of you people out there may think it’s perfectly normal for a woman who has been grieving for three years suddenly to throw herself at a older man, and then walk away from her prestigious job promoting Sweden to Europe. In such a case, you are likely to find Delicacy or La délicatesse a delightful romantic drama, once again showing Audrey Tautou at her gamine best. Bruno Todeschini sees straight through Markus. If my understanding of the French was right, he accuses Markus of being a comedian and a fucking poet (it’s meant ironically, of course). And François Damiens gives a breathtakingly convincing performance as the boring bloke (winning the Sarlat International Cinema Festival 2011 for the performance).

 

The Assault or L’assaut (2010)

film

When I was young, there was an experimental movement in film-making that we can now authoritatively call cinéma vérité. Both in true documentary and fictional forms, the director’s intention is to maximise the capture of reality on the screen. Some have believed the best way to do this is to hide the cameras. This would mean everything on the screen is unscripted and unrehearsed. All would, of course, be filtered through the director’s eye when it comes to cutting the raw images together and adding a soundtrack. But it would be “real life” on the screen. To a greater or lesser extent, other directors have moved away from this purist position depending on the extent to which they believe the known presence of the cameras affects the behaviour of those being filmed. Today we have “reality” shows on television where cameras follow groups of people in their “everyday” lives. We have been taught how to suspend disbelief given that many of those “captured” are behaving in a surprisingly uninhibited way. Ignoring the game-show formats, some of the more interesting are like Jersey Shore in which we watch people caught in an artificial situation. It’s a form of voyeurism albeit without the more overtly sexual content. Think of it being a voyeurism that breaches the usual presumption of privacy.

Vincent Elbaz as Thierry, a tired soldier stepping into the front line again

 

One of the features of all forms of reality filming is the use of the hand-held camera. This technique now appears in straight fiction where the intention is to heighten awareness of movement, to make the action feel more dynamic, if not real. One of the most interesting early examples of this style is The Battle of Algiers (1966) in which Gillo Pontecorvo made the film in the style of a documentary. Mostly shot in black-and-white, it’s considered one of the best of the early attempts to create a newsreel style portrayal of real events. Continuing in the theme of the conflict between Algeria and the occupying French, we now come to The Assault or L’assaut (2010), a recreation of the Christmas crisis in 1994 when four Algerian terrorists hijacked Air France Flight 8969 with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

 

There are several features which make this film by Julien Leclercq rather interesting. First, he knows his film will be compared to United 93 (2006) in which Americans were invited to confront a piece of their own history in the story of the real-life events on one of the planes hijacked on the 11th September. Both films carefully avoid sensationalising these events of national significance. What we might call melodrama has been limited. But, unlike Paul Greengrass, Julien Leclercq took the decision to include real newsreel footage. This takes us into the same territory occupied by Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), in which Michael Winterbottom uses both real and faked footage to enhance the sense of realism. The question, always, in this kind of film, is the extent to which it’s legitimate to fictionalise history. By definition, the moment you write a script, you are editorialising, deciding what to include or exclude, what emphasis to place on different events and characters. It’s so easy to lionise one side and demonise the other when it comes to stories about terrorism.

Aymen Saïdi as a man who passionately believes he is right

 

On balance, I think Julien Leclercq does a good job as director and joint scriptwriter with Simon Moutairou. The decades of conflict between France and Algeria showed both sides at their worst. That this film, as a French film, emerges with any sense of balance is a testament to the ability of a modern film-maker to forgive the enemies of his country’s past and to embrace both sides as warriors worthy of respect. I say this despite the lack of any background context for these events. I lived through this history with the Organisation de l’armée secrète’s campaign to destabilise the French government and frustrate the movement to independence eventually leading to the Algerian attacks on mainland France. I’m not sure whether this film would have benefitted from two minutes of historical introduction. Modern viewers are rather thrown into this story at the deep end knowing nothing of the background nor of the role of the French intervention force called GIGN (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale). Although we are now used to the idea of hijacking planes both to force governments to release political prisoners and to crash them into iconic buildings, I suspect a short introductory summary would have enhanced understanding of these events.

Mélanie Bernier, a victim of discrimination who still manages to tell the truth

 

The story takes three different strands. The first focuses on Thierry (Vincent Elbaz), a senior member of the elite commando force called the GIGN. He’s under psychological pressure, finding it difficult to cope with his shoot-first, ask-questions-later role. The relationship with his wife and young child adds depth to the character. We then have Carole (Mélanie Bernier) who’s struggling under the appalling weight of sexist discrimination in the Foreign Ministry. She has done the research and understands the risks rather better than her complacent male bosses. But she’s also not wholly ethical, being prepared to offer money to one branch of the terrorist group in the hope this will encourage them to call off the hijacking. Then we have the four terrorists led by Yahia (Aymen Saïdi). They come over as committed but emotionally vulnerable. The scene when Yahia’s mother tries to talk him into giving up is particularly telling. In another place, at another time, these would be good men leading ordinary lives with their families. Because of the lack of historical context, we are left to guess at what would have driven them to engage in this grand gesture of defiance.

 

The film leads us through the initial stages of the hijack as the four terrorists pray together, then just drive on to the tarmac and board the plane. These were the days before airport security was improved. At first, the Algerian government refuses to allow the plane to leave but, when a French citizen is shot, the French government insists the plane is allowed to fly into France. Now the stage is set for the countdown to the assault. The majority of the passengers were Algerian nationals. The terrorists made no discrimination between innocent and guilty. Everyone on the plane was a hostage. Remarkably, most survived.

 

There are several features in the final stages of this sad event that remain unclear. Why was the plane allowed to move from where it was first parked in Marseille? Why did the terrorists not simply start killing all the passengers. Why did the GIGN not shoot the terrorists through the windows of the plane? Such questions do not detract from the power of how the operation was concluded. Insofar as anything can be considered a triumph emerging from such a tragedy, this is what happened.

 

I’m not convinced this is the most entertaining of films. It certainly has no Hollywood pretensions to lift morale and show the “good guys” winning. Shot for much of the time in a pseudo-documentary “black and white”, it desaturates both the colour and, to some extent, the characters so that we can focus on the events as they unfold. This is not about the people so much as about the immediacy of what actually happened. This gives The Assault or L’assaut a raw intensity of emotional power. It commands attention from start to finish. I emerged from the cinema feeling saddened that humans can do such terrible things but heartened that, sometimes, people respond well in difficult situations. For those who enjoy realism, this is as good a film in the style of cinéma vérité as you are likely to see for a long time.

 

For a more general discussion of what constitutes a documentary, see Should historical films be like documentaries?