After his 1980s-set pansexual drama Les témoins (The Witnesses), French veteran director André Téchiné returns to the present for his latest project, tentatively titled La fille du RER ("The Girl on the Train"). The film will start shooting next month and is based on a true story of a mythomaniac young woman who told the French media in 2004 that she had been the victim of an anti-semitic attack on one of the Paris-area urban trains (the "RER" of the French title). The star of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta, Émilie Dequenne, will play the young woman (called Alice in the film), while veteran actress Catherine Deneuve will play Alice's overbearing mother Louise. It will mark Deneuve's 6th collaboration with Téchiné; more than any other director in history.

Michel Blanc, who played the doctor in Les témoins, has been cast in the role of Samuel Blumenstein, a successful lawyer who used to know Louise and who is currently looking for someone to help him out at work. Louise becomes obsessed with the idea that Alice should have that position, which leads to an awkward get-together in the countryside and a radical act from Alice, whose idea of her future is completely different from that of her mother's.

La fille du RER will also star Mathieu Demy (Quelques jours en septembre / A Few Days in September), Israeli actor Ronit Elkabetz (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret / The Band's Visit) and upcoming French talent Nicolas Duvauchelle, who was already Dequenne's co-star in Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe's 2006 adaptation of Le Grand Meaulnes.

The film will premiere in early 2009 and might make an appearance at the Berlinale, where where the Téchiné-Deneuve Les temps qui changent (Changing Times) opened the festival in 2005 and where Les témoins played in competition last year.

(sources: cineuropa.org, unifrance, allocine / photo: Catherine Deneuve in Palais Royal!, (c) Gaumont Columbia Tristar Pictures, 2005)