The Hedgehog

Lately, meaning most of this summer, there haven't been any movies that looked worth seeing. But now that summer is past, the good movies are beginning to emerge from wherever they were hiding (mostly abroad, I suspect), and today, I went to an afternoon movie with Liz, a French flick adapted from a book. The film was called The Hedgehog. I forget what the book's title was.
It was one of those delicate little foreign flicks told from the pov of a precocious child, 11 years old, and way too smart for her own good. She was part of a rich and completely ridiculous family, which seemed like a caricature of a family in fact, and she planned to kill herself on her 12th birthday. No one noticed or cared about anything she did; they were all locked into their own separate "goldfish bowls," as the girl, Paloma, had it. She wanted to die because the idea of growing up to be like them was too awful to bear.
Luckily, she was not the only one out of place here... a secretive concierge with a cabinet full of books and a new resident in the building, a Japanese director keeping the secret of his own fame in another country were there to rescue her by making her realize that she could be what she chose to be and would not be limited by her birth.
I could have stayed to watch another film, a Japanese parody of martial arts movies, but I had other things to do. Still, it's very encouraging that there are good movies out there again, and it seems more are on the way! Hooray!