Movie Review: Roman de Gare
Moira Macdonald - Seattle Times
May 16, 2008
"What can be more beautiful than a perfect crime?" wonders a novelist in Claude Lelouch's enticing thriller "Roman de Gare." It's an idea explored deliciously in the film, whose veteran director ("A Man and a Woman") teases his audience about what we're seeing, or what we think we're seeing. It's a story about a writer who slips in and out of the pages of the character's book, leaving the viewer perpetually wondering who the narrative belongs to. We wander in a hall of mirrors before emerging, happily blinking, at the film's end.
The French phrase "roman de gare" translates as a best-seller, the type of novel one might find for sale at an airport or train station. And Lelouch's film presents many elements that you just might find in an airport thriller: a serial killer on the loose, an unhappy young woman who accepts a ride from a stranger, a dark farmhouse in a remote area, a wealthy and powerful woman capable of manipulating those who don't suit her whims. There are long shots, taken from a driver's seat, of dark nights in Paris and sunlit yet ominous country roads, and moonlit scenes of an elegant boat whose sails seem so sharp as to slash the night sky.
And there are the characters, a promising trio who circle each other warily. Judith (Fanny Ardant) is the wealthy novelist; in the film's opening scenes (introduced with a nod to the classic French crime film "Quai des Orfevres"), she's interrogated and accused of murder. Huguette (Audrey Dana) is an angry young woman abandoned at a gas station by her fiance; she's a self-admitted airhead whose smoky eyes nonetheless seem to take in everything. Dominique Pinon plays the stranger who gives her a ride; he is, he tells her, a ghostwriter and novelist intrigued by her story. "Do you believe in God?" she asks him, in the way ingenues always ask telling questions of strangers. "When I can park in Paris, yes," he says.
But who is this man -- frustrated ghostwriter, serial killer or anonymous man escaping from a life too bland? Lelouch lets us think one thing but shows us another, all the while delicately wrapping us in an often very funny story of mistaken identity. (Huguette insists that her new friend pose as her fiance to her rural family -- whose farm comes complete with the eerie squalling of hogs on the verge of slaughter.) "Roman de Gare" is an ingenuous knot of plot, expertly tangled, in which nothing is quite what it seems. "It's not a confession," says Judith, eyes blazing, to her interrogator. "It's literature."
3.5 stars
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