May 19, 2008

MOVIES: Roman de gare (Claude Lelouch, 2007/US 2008)

The title doesn't translate precisely into English, but "airport novel" would have something of the same flavor.

Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is an author of such novels -- thrillers with very little literary ambition --and we meet her in a police station where she is the prime suspect in a murder. She begins to tell the story of the events that led up to that death (claiming to be entirely innocent, of course), a story from which she is strangely absent for a very long time.

That story begins on a rainy night when a serial killer known as "the Magician" has escaped from a Paris prison. Pierre (Dominique Pinon) has stopped at a service station in the middle of nowhere, and we are given ample hints that he might be The Magician. A young couple has a frantic argument at the service station, and the man drives off, stranding Huguette (Audrey Dana). The couple had been on their way to visit Huguette's family, so that they could meet her fiance for the first time. Pierre offers to give her a ride, and eventually agrees to pose as her fiance.

Is Pierre The Magician, or is he (as he claims) Judith Ralitzer's secretary, and secretly the author of her most successful novels? And given that we're being told this story by a novelist, how much of it can be believed on any level? (The fact that Judith is the writer of cheap thrillers allows Lalouche to have great fun wallowing in some of the genre's cliches.)

The twists and turns aren't quite as clever as they might be, and there are a few spots where the storytelling drags a bit -- Pierre and Huguette take an awfully long time driving to her family's farm -- but there's enough style and wit here to keep the movie entertaining, and Pinon is particularly fine, bringing a creepy ambiguity to Pierre that keeps us wondering what he's really up to.

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