SIFF Review: The Hedgehog

Some people will fall in love with 11-year-old Paloma, the rich Paris girl who dispassionately plans to kill herself on her twelfth birthday in The Hedgehog, a sprightly, contrived film derived from the bestselling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

The book is basically an excuse for nonstop random philosophizing, which made it a runaway bestseller in France, where everybody studies philosophy in school with the fervor we devote to America’s Top Model.

It works better in a book than in a film to have a kid film everyone in her high-end apartment building while voice-overing her hyperanalytical lucubrations. But there is a certain undeniable charm in her critique of her therapy-and-champagne-addicted social parasite mom, work-distracted dad, and irritable big sister, and even if you’re immune to her charm, just when you might want to accelerate Paloma’s death, she becomes obsessed with her gruff housemaid Renee, the hedgehog of the title – she’s “spiky on the outside, but elegant on the inside.”

It turns out Renee is a closet intellectual, literally, with a vast library secreted in her maid’s cubbyhole. Renee’s courtship by a rich Japanese widower is highly improbable but, like the movie as a whole, it’s kind of an agreeable little fable.

The Hedgehog
May 28, 7:00pm
May 30, 4:00pm
(Uptown Theater)