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The Vow

A saccharine and paint-by-numbers slice of romance, which is largely boosted by the appeal of its two leads.

Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace (3D)

The under-utilised 3D adds little to this prequel, which only serves as a sore reminder of the brilliance of the original films.

Any Questions For Ben?

The talented bunch of actors ably cut through the surface gloss, but it’s tough to remain invested in the plight of the self-absorbed lead.

Shame

It starts off as brutal but arresting stuff, and the two lead performances are scorching, but disappointingly dissolves into a case of tragedy for the sake of tragedy.

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The Hedgehog (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | July 05, 2010 13:09 | Edited July 06, 2010 13:51

Despite competent acting and a handful of moving scenes, this arthouse crowd-pleaser ultimately proves underwhelming.

The thing about hedgehogs, in the Muriel Barbery book upon which this film is "freely inspired", is that their tough and prickly exterior masks a sensitive interior. And so the supposedly delightfully surprising quality of the characters in this story is that they have hidden depths. But it's all so clearly signposted that there's actually very little surprise at all, and the end result is generally underwhelming.

 

The setting is an opulent apartment building in Paris, where bored and precociously intelligent eleven-year-old, Paloma Josse (Garance Le Guillermic), resides with her rich family. Paloma is a talented drawer, but also relentlessly and obsessively films all the people around her - though she seems to hold them in contempt - and resolves to commit suicide on her twelfth birthday. Meanwhile, the lonely and comparably unhappy concierge/janitor, Renee Michel (Josiane Balasko), presents a sullen and uncultured face to the other residents, while discreetly having a richly cerebral inner life. Renee is like the reverse of the protagonist in The Reader: her "guilty" secret is that she's highly literate and loves reading. Then there's the genial but mysterious Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa): he's suave and he's chivalrous and (stereotypically enough) he's inscrutable. 

 

Directed by relatively promising 29-year-old debut filmmaker Mona Achache, The Hedgehog is slick, middlebrow fare of the crowd-pleasing arthouse-light type which tends to get the opening night spot at film festivals. The extremely fleeting animated sequences are effective, and the acting is fine. It improves, slightly, as it goes on, and some scenes are quite moving. The emotional manipulation gets irritating though, and the characters seem more archetypal than real. They exist merely to prove a point.