The Hedgehog: on death, and the Hidden Grace of Our Souls

Review of the movie ‘The Hedgehog’ directed by Mona Achache

Movies are intended for no more than two things: to capture and to magnify. The sole standard that differentiates a movie of good quality and one clumsily made is whether the production is able to shed light on topics so prevalent yet ignored in life, and through fine artistic expressions bring them out with full dramatic force, mingled with romance stemmed from mundane life but undoubtedly surpassing it. From the pantheon of celebrated movies, The Hedgehog without doubt exceeded its peers in achieving excellence in the aforementioned expectations of a good movie.

The Hedgehog revolves around three characters living in a luxurious apartment in Paris. Paloma is an eleven year old girl planning to kill herself on her twelfth birthday, horrified by the tethering nature of life itself, and how every single person around her lives a life of omnipresent predicament while possessing a sickening pride in what they own inside the “fish bowl,” oblivious to the presence of the fish bowl itself. She deems herself a pioneer, braving her way out of the circular glassware of a life by leaping out of the water and anticipating to die in the air of dignity and truth. Renee is the janitor, a cold, harsh woman on the outside, a living analogy to a hedgehog, and the only one in the apartment without an elevated status. Finally, Kakuro Ozu is a Japanese widower, a new tenant of the apartment who quickly befriended Paloma and established a relationship that is somewhere just more than friendship with Renee. 

Naturally, Paloma wants to leave something behind for the world to see, as it is an intrinsic urge of us human beings, if it is not all we have been doing, before leaving it once and for all, and the best thing she could think of is to record all the moments of brutal struggle and infinite haggardness she manages to come across, as a mocking finale, delivering her last punch to the world. 

As Paloma proceeds her work of recording the world and counting down until the days she will take her life, she accidentally spots a book lying on the janitor’s desk while returning her cat to her office. In Praise of Shadows, a sophisticated book inspecting the elegance of life, and with a glance of this book Paloma henceforth stole a lucky peek into Renee’s life and witnessed her wisdom and ruminations behind her humbled look and attitude in comparison with the rotting beasts banging around the hollow shell of the distinguished tenants. The other witness of such a glamorous soul is Mr. Ozu. This is where the movie brought up its first philosophical stance, that every single person has a certain grace hidden in their souls, often much overlooked by the people around us, and that it often takes a whole lot of kindness, patience and even a little bit of a miracle to have this grace seen. And to deem this grace as a credit due, the observer has to have a soul vibrating with the same frequency as the graceful soul, or else no matter how obvious, it will be a fruitless search dissolving into disheartening loneliness. Renee is lucky to find Mr.Ozu and Paloma, and the sentence works equally well the other way around.

However, despite her deepening connection with Mr. Ozu and Renee, Paloma still wants to die. Ironically, it is Renee, on the verge of a hopeful future with Mr. Ozu, who is suddenly killed in a car accident. Paloma, hearing the news, cried helplessly in her room. This is when she decided not to die. Therefore the movie slips into the second theme: the power of death over life, or somehow really the power of love over life. There was a scene wedged somewhere in the movie in which Paloma’s neighbor died and she pointed her camera towards the body. Fear was not present, there was only calmness, a tranquility and assurance from Paloma as if it all was just a rehearsal, and soon her body would be one lifeless as Renee’s. Her death taught Paloma how to live. There is always something so incredibly funny about death by one’s own pursuit, how they were not death, not at all, but a rejection of life, and how another person's love or death could teach them the integrity to preserve.

The Hedgehog successfully portrays the struggle to be understood in an often superficial society, where time is greatly invested upon the production of outward value instead of the search for innate value. It paints the lure of death to wandering souls and the wonder that one might just meet a few people that will ground them to the smears of meaning in a mundane world.

Maxine Zhou ‘29

image by: The Hedgehog