The American Spectator : The Hedgehog

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The Hedgehog

By James Bowman on 10.11.11 @ 6:02AM

Left-wing intellectuals, it appears, are all alike.

There's more than one kind of movie fantasy destined to end up in the DVD bargain bin, and The Hedgehog (Le Hérisson) by Mona Achache is a peculiarly French kind -- though perhaps the director herself sees it as more Japanese. It is, at any rate, an intellectual's fantasy, embodying as it does the belief that, secretly, those noble proletarians and children of toil in whose name so many of one's utopian projects are undertaken and, occasionally, executed are really intellectuals too, just like one, aspiring to live the life of the mind, of art and culture while being kept down by the jackboots of the bourgeoisie on their throats. As a result, they suffer the indignity of having to pretend to be stupid and boorish and intellectually incurious when in fact they are highly cultured -- rather like film-makers or professors of gender studies at the university. As Ms. Achache's heroine, Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko), puts it: "Nobody wants a pretentious concierge."

Therefore, Renée herself keeps her taste for the finer things of life out of sight. Even her extensive and very high-brow library has to be kept hidden behind a curtain in her little concierge's flat so that casual visitors will not notice it. This is because they, and especially those who are residents of her upscale Parisian apartment building, prefer that the concierge should live up to the stereotype by (as she says) being fat and surly and stinking of cassoulet. So she obliges them, all the while keeping her more refined and intellectual tastes, like the library, out of sight. Now I would hate to be thought of as being unkind or contemptuous to concierges, but I venture to suggest that the fat, surly, and cassoulet-scoffing sort without any intellectual hinterland is a good deal more common even in France -- as is her equivalent is in the U.S. -- than the secretly refined and intellectual sort.

But left-wing intellectuals, who may be even more common in France than in the U.S., prefer to entertain themselves with fantasies of workers and peasants who are, beneath their slightly rough exteriors, exactly like themselves. Such, I take it, is Muriel Barbery who wrote the book (L'élégance du hérisson) on which Ms. Achache's film is based. One reviewer has compared the latter to Babette's Feast "in which the hard-bitten residents of a village savor gourmet food for the first time" -- though of course the appeal of gourmet food is likely to be a little more widespread than that of the Japanese aesthetics of Junichiro Tanizaki's Éloge de l'ombre, which is the light reading of Madame Michel -- or even than that of Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina is what brings her together with Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa). Mr. Ozu is a courtly Japanese gentleman who has lately moved into the building. He immediately spots Renée's secret intellectual life because of her allusion to that novel's famous opening sentence about happy families' being all alike.

I've never understood that line, by the way. It seems to me patently false. Tolstoy as novelist must have been as bored by happy families as the film's ostensible subject, who is eleven-year-old aspiring documentary film-maker Paloma Josse (Garance Le Guillermic), the younger daughter of one of the families in Madame Michel's building. Paloma's family may not be all that happy, but it's a cinch that it is happier than she wants us to think it is in her snarky voiceover comments about her mother, father, and sister. She grabs our attention at the outset by telling us, also in voiceover, that she plans to kill herself on her twelfth birthday. To this end she is pilfering her mother's anti-depressants, one by one, until she thinks she has stockpiled enough of them to do the job. "Planning to die doesn't mean I let myself go like a rotten vegetable," she confides to us and her father's videocamera. "What matters isn't the fact of dying or when you die. It's what you're doing at that precise moment."

That's an even more fatuous statement than the one about happy families being all alike, though sounds as if it came from an 11-year-old all right -- someone for whom death is still something theoretical rather than real. But I have an awful feeling that it is meant to be a profundity. At any rate, it gives us one reason why this bright and apparently sane and emotionally stable prepubescent child should want to kill herself, which is something at least as improbable in real life as an intellectual concierge. Another, even feebler reason is that Paloma thinks she and her family live like her sister's pet goldfish and "the fishbowl isn't for me." The point, I guess, is confinement and not transparency, as this has no obvious implication for Paloma's life more than anyone else's. She sees through others, or thinks she does (I'm guessing that Ms. Achache thinks so too), but they don't see through her. But why does what she sees in her family and those around her produce such contempt for them that self-slaughter seems the only way out?

The goldfish bowl, that is, is a seriously stressed metaphor even before we get to the symbolic implications of the real one with the real fish in it to which Paloma gives one of her mother's anti-depressants as an experiment. Overburdened symbolism is another way in which this is an intellectual's movie, along with its self-indulgence in a favorite intellectual fantasy and the fact that everything about it is so theoretical. The idea appears to be that life is only worth living because of the secret parts of it, that which lives out of sight in the delights of privacy where anything is possible and not in the dreary world of the goldfish bowl where everything is so obvious and, therefore, terminally boring. Here, however, even the goldfish has a secret, and Paloma's friendship with the secretive concierge, her delighted discovery of what remains hidden from her boring bourgeois parents, is meant as an affirmation of life. I'm not buying it myself, but then I don't think her bourgeois parents can really be as boring as Paloma -- like Ms. Achache and Ms. Barbery -- thinks they are either.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (18) | Leave a comment

Kevin Dunn| 10.11.11 @ 7:03AM

It is not clear what she was actually reading in this fine library - be a laugh if it was Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, George Orwell, von Mises, Wlliam Buckley or even The American Spectator!

Jim| 10.11.11 @ 9:06AM

I must admit, I would not see this film even if they paid me to go. But then, I don't watch TMZ, the royal families, the annual film maker awards etc. either. Films about class envy appeal only to the intellectual left. I don't understand why the unwashed masses continue to lay down their paltry few dollars to see such a film instead of using their money to improve their lot in life. Who knows, if one works hard and studies hard, one might just become part of the upper class (admittance to and envy of which is what this film is really about).

Bill| 10.11.11 @ 9:06AM

She says, "What matters isn't the fact of dying or when you die. It's what you're doing at that precise moment."

Isn't what you're doing at that precise moment is pulling the trigger, or sitting or lying in bed, waiting for the poison to kick in? Anyway, not all that fetching a sight (or vision). Maybe cutting your own throat with a straight razor would be more photogenic.

Cromulent| 10.11.11 @ 9:45AM

I can't be the only one that saw "Hedgehog" in the title and thought this film was about Ron Jeremy.

Timothy L. Pennell| 10.11.11 @ 10:23AM

Actually., I'm pretty sure that you are.
You might wanna put a lid on any of those PORN references.

Occam's Tool| 10.11.11 @ 5:39PM

Dear Ron, whose GIRLFRIEND got him started in the porn business (I lived 4 years in the San Fernando Valley, I know many things I would prefer not to have learned), as the Hedgehog, who knows one thing.

Negro X| 10.12.11 @ 2:23AM

Yeah, I thought the same thing, lol.

Timothy L. Pennell| 10.11.11 @ 9:53AM

What the Hell was that? It sounded like something from a Giant Fortune Cookie.
Jimmy. Jimmy Bowman. I have an I.Q. of 148, and I what the Hell you're talking about.
Being the ownwer of a truck load of $5 words, doesn't mane one, Rich. (Why am I thinking that you couldn't change a Flat Tire, if your life depended on it?)
Bill. What the Hell are YOU talking about.
Mine is the 4th Comment, on this mess.
And, if it's the last one? I would not be surprised.

POST American| 10.11.11 @ 9:58AM

Well, certainly in terms of where they get
their backing, funding, and promotion from
---the NEA ---the Globalist CIA ----and
Carn-EGG-he, Ford and Rock--ef--L--O.

"The destruction of ALLLL that was."
-prime tenet of the Globalists.

Lev Tolstoy| 10.11.11 @ 11:02AM

Tolstoy's opening line from Anna Karenina made immediate sense to me. Tolstoy's family life was complicated and seldom happy. He was difficult to live with and made ridiculous demands of his wife, who was often unhappy- she bore him 13 children and he insisted on living simply despite being wealthy beyond most peoples' dreams. Tolstoy knew it and could not bring himself to change, hence Anna Karenina. Nothing about Tolstoy is fatuous. He confessed his own sins through his writing and learned to understand himself and humanity that way. He was a genius, even if often selfish and difficult.

Alan Brooks| 10.11.11 @ 5:14PM

Tt is true in the past leftists were the clueless ones.
today the Right is living in the distant past, as commies once lived in an 1848 midset.
In the '80s, Reagan had a vision; today, if the Left lacks vision, the Right needs white canes to get around.

CalMark| 10.11.11 @ 5:57PM

Well, then, leave us, wise one!

Go to HuffPo or CNN or someplace, and be among your own enlightened kind. We worthless conservatives don't like going among your kind--no doubt we realize that we are far, far too inferior and thus unworthy.

We backwards idiots also don't like having our betters come to our hovels to criticize us. Which raises the question, if you are not mentally ill, what possesses you to come here?

Alan Brooks| 10.11.11 @ 8:01PM

"Well, then, leave us, wise one! Go to HuffPo or CNN"

No, Rightists blog at Leftist blogs-- you are asking for unilateral de-blogization.

Alan Brooks| 10.12.11 @ 2:26AM

I rant, not to enlighten but to feed my ego and raise my self esteem. Mom won't give me bus fare to NY to join the protests until I finish the yard work, ungrateful bitch, she had me it's her responsibilty to take care of me.

Brad| 10.11.11 @ 7:53PM

Our vision is of an America that WORKED.

Where unemployment was low, people could start their own businesses without government interference.

One where those who would destroy us thought twice because of our strength, and willingness to use it.

In short - Reagan's vision.

You leftists are STILL clueless (in the past? LOL!)

Your "vision" has already been tried all over the world, and caused untold heartache and suffering. Yet you fools insist on trying it here.

We need white canes?

You need BRAINS.

Alan Brooks| 10.11.11 @ 8:09PM

"In short - Reagan's vision."

But not Nixon's?
not Ford's
not Bush 41's
or Bush 43's vision?
not Bob Dole's or John McCain's vision?

you are 1-6

Not a good score, Brad. I live in the Heartland and know how old fashioned America is, if you ran better candidates, you would win. But you screw it up.

Tonawanda| 10.11.11 @ 7:53PM

The first line of Anna Karenina means that happy families have in common their love for each other; unhappy families are denied happiness by idiosyncratic selfishness.

Neither War and Peace (with the exception of the last dozens of pages) nor Anna Karenina are intellectual works. They are beautiful descriptions of human life. It is astonishing a single human being had such powers of observation, let alone the talent to create works of art based on those powers.

The first line of Anna Karenina might be the best summary of both these works.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina are, in my opinion, the foremost documents of conservative thinking.

POST American| 10.11.11 @ 11:14PM

"I met one of the Rockefellows,
smart guy. He looked at me once and
said -'What do you think 'Women's Lib'
was all about? ---It wasn't about ANY
kind of liberation. It was about doubling
the tax base, cheapening the labor
force ---and destroying the family. DON'T
you understand that yet?
WE funded it ALLLLL to bring that about."
-AARON RUSSO
(film-maker/ 11th hour fighter
against the Globalists)

And likewise, right now, with the ROT-child
front man SOROS funding and coordinating
this loud and vapid Wall Street scripted affair.

------------SEE the full interview on Google vids.

'AARON RUSSO interview'.

ALAS--- ---the LATE AARON RUSSO.

-----------HUAC meets NUREMBERG 2012---------