The Hedgehog/Le Herisson

Directed by Mona Achache. Starring Josiane Balasko, Garance Le Guillermic, Togo Igawa, Anne Brochet Club, IFI, Dublin, 100min

YOU HAVE TO feel queasy about a middlebrow French film that actually introduces a character named Mr Ozu. Does it make it better or worse that the film goes on to explicitly reference the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu? It's hard to say. To let the allusion slide might appear neglectful. However, having the characters sit down to watch the great man's The Munekata Sisterspushes the film towards dangerous banality.

At any rate, The Hedgehogfunctions well enough as an exercise in quirky bourgeois angst. A curly- haired young neurotic, living with anguished posh parents, sets out to record her life with an old-school video camera. Her dad is having trouble at the ministry. Mum is going through a neurotic crisis. Her sister is at that stage where every inconvenience triggers a yelling fit.

The centre of the film is, however, initially a barely noticed personality. The concierge (Josiane Balasko) of the apartment building – a large lady with a secret taste for literature – lives a quiet life. Treated with a mixture of apathy and contempt by the residents, she spends her days ploughing through Tolstoy and swallowing vast amounts of chocolate.

Things change when Mr Ozu (Togo Igawa) moves into an apartment upstairs. Like characters in a film by some Japanese director whose name eludes me, the two lonely folk start a tentative, obtuse relationship. He cooks food. She gets a decent haircut.

The film never quite settles into a rhythm. Moments of intellectual insight alternate with outbreaks of sentimentality. Early on, the concierge seems cynical about the world and its vulgarities. Later, she softens like a repressed teacher in a 1980s high-school comedy.

Still, The Hedgehoghas enough surface class to distract from its tonal insecurity. Strangeness can be a virtue in itself.