The Hedgehog

Impressions before seeing it
I stumbled on a brief plot synopsis online and it sounded interesting: an 11 year-old girl decides that she's going to kill herself on her 12th birthday. As dark as that is, I was curious about someone that young making such a heavy decision. Plus I do love French cinema.

How was it?
I felt that Paloma's (the 11 year-old) reason for wanting to die was understandable but not necessarily justifiable. Her family is rich, superficial, and boring, and she doesn't want to grow up to be like them. Okay, fine, but killing yourself is like accepting that fate and then escaping it entirely rather than changing it. But one comes to understand that her view of adulthood is narrow-minded and negative, probably because she doesn't get out much and the only adults she knows are her insufferable relatives.

That is, until she starts spending time with two particular adults in her building: Renee the housekeeper, who is the title character (Paloma likens her to a hedgehog because she can be ugly and abrasive on the outside but soft and intellectual on the inside); and Mr. Ozu, the wise, classy Japanese gentleman who has just moved into the building and bonds with Renee over their love of literature. These two are little Paloma's first real friends and as we watch her smile and admit that she enjoys their company, we wonder if she'll still go through with that which she is still adamant about. I enjoyed the characters and their interactions, and the minor commentaries on class and age. Paloma spends a lot of the movie sneaking around and filming everyone like a documentary filmmaker, narrating with biting sarcasm and condescension, collecting evidence of why she wants to escape these self-obsessed fools (perhaps it's more to convince herself), but as she films Renee and Mr. Ozu I think it starts to become reasons not to. Maybe life itself is a hedgehog, and there's always something cuddly under the needles.

Recommendation
It's not really as dark and depressing a movie as it might sound, but it's an interesting one. Foreign films are harder to recommend because they're so different from American movies, so I will just say that I liked it.