The Hedgehog

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About.com Rating

The Hedgehog is an odd little movie. Adapted from the international best seller The Elegance of the Hedgehog, French filmmaker Mona Achache has created a smart, funny and warm film for children -- that is too disturbing to show to children.

Eleven-year-old Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic) has decided that life is not worth living, that we all exist in a pointless fishbowl that will only end in suffering.

In the film’s opening monologue, delivered with flat panache from the young actress, Paloma informs us that she intends to end her life on her twelfth birthday, which will take place in 153 days. Her decision is not casual.

Paloma is enormously appealing. She is smart and she is also cute -- in a smart girl, precocious way. Because of her round eyeglasses, it’s hard not to compare her to Harry Potter. She also wears striped shirts and carries a video camera where ever she goes, documenting the ridiculous and therefore tragic behavior of the adults she lives among.

While at first the premise seems strangely funny -- an adorable girl smarter than her years, capturing the hypocricsy of her wealthy parents -- before long it becomes clear that Paloma is serious about dying. She is collecting pills. She is unhappy. She performs a deadly experiment on her older sister’s beloved goldfish.

Muriel Babery’s best-selling novel, which I have not read, apparently contains dense philosophical passages and is not meant to be a children’s book -- my original misconception, given the strangely whimsical tone of the film.

There are two other major characters in the story, the elderly Japanese man Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa) who moves into Paloma’s building, and the building’s janitor Rene Michel (Josiane Balasko), an overweight and surly woman.

Like Paloma, the elderly Kakuro finds himself fascinated with the janitor -- who turns out to be much more than what meets the eye. Rene is a closet intellectual, rendered invisible by her unfortunate profession and years of grief. The miserable woman is the film’s titular Hedgehog, rough and spiky on the outside, but a treasure on the inside.

Somehow, the melancholic Japanese man, the depressive Paloma, and the gruff Hedgehog manage to bring out the best in each other. The possibility of joy arises. Rather than coming across as a philosophical treatise on life, Achache’s film has a veneer that is overly cute -- though that might be the fault of Paloma in her striped shirts. Nonetheless, the story manages to be touching.
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