Theatrical Release

The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) (Director: Mona Achache): Based on the best-selling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, this 2009 film is finally get­ting a the­at­rical release on this side of the world. Alas, it’s only in the US for now, but I figure that I have at least a few readers out­side of the Toronto area.

Precocious and bored, 11-year-old Paloma decides that on her 12th birthday, she will end her life. She’s sick of her par­ents and older sister and their com­fort­able bour­geois life­style. She com­puls­ively films them with a hand-me-down video camera and protests that she doesn’t want to live like a gold­fish in a fish­bowl. She’s incred­ibly bright and wants more from life, but doesn’t see a way to get it.

Ms. Michel, the wid­owed jan­itor of the luxury building where she lives, seems like she might be a kindred spirit, but she’s extremely private. Everything changes on the day that Mr. Ozu moves into the building. This cul­tured older Japanese man pays no atten­tion to the class dif­fer­ences and petty jeal­ousies of the other ten­ants, striking up con­ver­sa­tions with both Paloma and Ms. Michel within days of his arrival.

An off­hand remark involving a quote from Tolstoy (Mr. Ozu begins the quote and Ms. Michel fin­ishes it) kindles a deeper curi­osity and before long he has asked her to dinner. If you haven’t guessed already, Renée (as we dis­cover is Ms. Michel’s first name) is the hedgehog of the title. As described by Paloma, she is prickly on the out­side, but only to hide her inner eleg­ance. No, I’m not sure how a hedgehog could be described as elegant, either, but it’s a mem­or­able descrip­tion. Paloma begins to spend more time with Renée and tells her that as a jan­itor, she has found a “per­fect hiding place,” as if the older woman had simply chosen to be a building jan­itor out of a panoply of other career options.

Our trio of char­ac­ters are all highly intel­li­gent and lonely out­siders, and so nat­ur­ally they come together, but everything seems just a bit too neat. An 11-year-old like Paloma, who draws and paints at a high level, plays Go and speaks some Japanese could really only exist in a novel (or a movie). Renée is another vari­ation on the crusty char­acter who really has a heart of gold. Worst of all, Mr. Ozu is the Franco-Asian equi­valent of the “magical negro,” an exotic char­acter who dis­penses wisdom and brings the other char­ac­ters together while we really know nothing about his own motivations.

But while the film is schem­atic and (mostly) pre­dict­able, it remains enjoy­able, mostly for me due to Josiane Balasko’s per­form­ance as Renée. A vet­eran comic actor (she played the Jennifer Saunders’ part in the French ver­sion of Absolutely Fabulous) and an accom­plished dir­ector in her own right, she por­trays a lonely woman’s bewil­der­ment at being desired with sub­tlety and grace. I also loved the occa­sional use of anim­a­tion to illus­trate some of Paloma’s inner struggles.

As someone who has not read the source novel, I can’t com­ment on whether it is a faithful adapt­a­tion, but based upon the amount of voi­ceover nar­ra­tion by Paloma, I expect that the novel would allow us sim­ilar access to the inner lives of both Renée and of Mr. Ozu. As well, because Paloma’s story seems to be the central thread, I wasn’t cer­tain whether I was watching a film aimed more at the adoles­cent set than at a more gen­eral audience.

Tagged as: france

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