The Hedgehog

In THE HEDGEHOG, Paloma is a precocious 11-year-old French girl who lives in a luxurious apartment with her neurotic rich family. Bored to death, alienated, and aloof to her family's petty concerns, she hides from them whenever possible. She emerges only to capture their curious behavior with her video camera while she provides an existentialist stream-of-consciousness narrative. Paloma has decided that life, as she is destined to live it, is not worth living; she therefore plans to kill herself on her 12th birthday. Meanwhile, downstairs lives Renée, the apartment building's unhappy middle-aged caretaker. Grateful to be ignored by the building's self-absorbed inhabitants, she uses her time to pursue an eccentric passion for Tolstoy. When gentle Mr. Kakuro, a sophisticated Japanese man, moves into the building, Paloma and Renée are drawn to his quiet intelligence, and a three-way friendship begins. Based on Muriel Barbery's best-selling French novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog.” (In French with subtitles) –B.B.