Going off-track: "The Girl on the Train"

The Girl on the Train, the latest of director André Téchiné's intricate miniatures, makes an extrapolation from a real-life incident that had the French chattering classes chattering more than ever. In 2004, a young woman from the Parisian suburbs claimed she was beaten up by anti-Semitic thugs on a commuter train, only - after the incident had provoked howls of protest and outrage - to later recant and reveal she'd made up the whole story, including her non-existent Jewish origins; that she was, in fact, another of the modern world's mythomanes, seeking to bring attention upon herself by exploiting some of the cracks opening up within society. The case inspired a play (RER by Jean-Marie Besset, a co-writer here) and, inevitably, questions about the line said society was running on: bad enough to have actual religious and racial intolerance going on without people making it up.

The mystery surrounding the titular Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne, above) in Téchiné's film is that she seemingly has everything going for her. Though her father was killed in combat in Afghanistan some years before, she still has a doting mother (Catherine Deneuve) in her corner; indeed, the latter has pulled some strings to get her daughter an interview for a secretarial position at the firm of a top Jewish lawyer (Michel Blanc, foursquare and nicely matter-of-fact as the conscience of the piece) who has ties to the family. Jeanne has a new beau, too, in Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), an aspiring wrestler who endears himself to her (if hardly to us) by getting her an ask-no-questions courier job and jovially threatening her with gang rape the first time he invites Jeanne back to his place.

Téchiné's time capsules - films that document specific places, eras, moments - have sometimes been rather implausibly packaged, as I felt was the issue with 2003's WW2 drama Strayed and 2007's AIDS-themed The Witnesses. The Girl on the Train, on the other hand, sets out to dramatise a complex social system in which each character's behaviour impacts upon that of another: in a typical footnote, Deneuve has a smoking habit she confesses to picking up from an old flame. The scenario divides equally down the middle, into chapters marked "Circumstances" and "Consequences" (or, to put it another way, cause and effect), as we're invited to consider Jeanne as very much a product of her environment. Were her actions a mollycoddled girl's bid for independence? A shameless cry for help? Or something altogether more conniving: an attempt to cross from the position of the accused to the status of victim, as has been historically conferred upon the Jewish people?

That such a needling sociological study should emerge from the same film industry that gave us Jean Rouch and Two or Three Things I Know About Her is no real surprise; what may be is just how attuned (and sympathetic) the 67-year-old Téchiné proves to the follies and foibles of the young. The director makes filmable - even sexy - Jeanne and Franck's first encounters over the Internet, while their actual sex scenes are framed as lurid fantasies playing out in the heroine's head; even fucking, she's never quite in the room. Téchiné has always been a sucker for stars, and while we might quibble that Deneuve is a little out of place in a film this streetwise, he locates in Dequenne the same wild, compelling desperation the Dardennes found for their Rosetta; she's a very contemporary presence in her stripey tops and in-line skates, caught between provincial innocence and a more damaging metropolitan cynicism, between knowing too much of the world and knowing not nearly enough.

In the end, Jeanne comes to be defined by her rollerblades and headphones; like so many of today's youngsters, taking refuge inside their iPods, her aim is to escape from reality (and the responsibilities that entails) into a bubble of her own making. "Learn to your open your eyes," cautions the police officer who finally reveals Franck's criminal activities to her. A subplot involving Blanc's lawyer, his wife and her ex would appear negligible were it not that it gives us the one line that best sums up the insular thinking of many of the characters here: "I've got my life, you've got yours". And never the twain, they hope, shall meet: Jeanne's deception is finally exposed by the lawyer's refusal to invest in a particular item that passes for social currency. From a strict story point-of-view, these details aren't essential, but with them, Téchiné transforms The Girl on the Train into a salutary lesson: how to make penetrating, multi-dimensional and - most of all - cinematic subject matter we Brits would most likely have reduced to a storm in a teacup, or - worse - ITV primetime drama.

The Girl on the Train is on selected release.