Product Details

• Actors: Fanny Ardant
• Format: NTSC
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: Samuel Goldwyn
• Run Time: 103 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0017AQS80
• For more information about "Roman de Gare" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A clever, amusing and satisfying look at...well, trash, with a wonderful performance by Dominique Pinon, June 29, 2008

By 

C. O. DeRiemer (San Antonio, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

What is this? A thriller? A murder mystery? A romance? A way to pass the next two hours or so? It's all of these, as the title tells us. Roman de Gare is also an intricate, fascinating and very amusing story with so many cleverly overlapping threads you'll need to pay attention.

There's Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) a best-selling author of popular novels. Wait...there's also her ghostwriter, Pierre Laclos (Dominique Pinon), who seems to have gone missing, perhaps permanently. There's Huguette (Audrey Dana), bruised around the edges and abandoned at a service station stop by her fiancée, who drives off with her car, her purse, her money and her identification. There's a schoolteacher who leaves his wife and kids. His wife turns out to be Pierre Laclos' sister. She finds solace by sharing Laclos' bed in his abandoned apartment below hers with the police officer that started out looking into her husband's disappearance and now is investigating the possible murder of Laclos by Judith Ralitzer. Got all that?

I almost forgot. There's also an escaped pedophile/rapist/murderer on the loose. We don't know what he looks like, but he loves to do the same kind of magic tricks for young girls that the man who may be Laclos likes to perform. When the possibly Laclos character meets Huguette, offers a ride and agrees to play her fiancé and meet Huguette's family, we're now in the kind of farm that makes Cold Comfort Farm look tidy. We listen to a jaunty, happy tune sung by, is it Laclos or not?, and Huguette as they go to fish for trout, while in the background we can hear the terrified squeals of a hog being butchered by her family.

Roman de Gare is a delight.

And all the while the man who may or not be Pierre Laclos is dictating notes in his pocket recorder. There's going to be a book in this somewhere. Will it be a new bestseller for Judith Ralitzer? Perhaps a book by a new author named Pierre Laclos. Might depend on who survives.

Fanny Ardant is intriguing, complex and has no trouble at all commanding the camera, but it is Dominique Pinon who carries us along. He's short, with a large head and squashed features. No one would call him handsome, much less a leading man, and yet that is what he turns out to be. One of his earliest movies was Diva in 1981. He had a supporting role as a short, ugly, vicious hood. His looks have mellowed a little at 52. His talent, however, has taken over. It's a pleasure to see how he takes this role and turns it into a whole catalogue of subtle emotions and possibilities. He keeps us thinking that his character could be a real problem, yet we wind up liking him the more we see him. He might even get the girl, but which one, and dead or alive? It's a wonderful performance.

Keep in mind what roman de gare means...the kind of trashy, glossy thriller we pick up at the airport to help pass the time. Director Claude Lelouch gives us a clever take on the form, with his tongue a bit in his cheek. It works superbly, in my view, most of the time. Roman de Gare is a great way to spend a couple of hours.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb masterpiece!, May 7, 2010

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Roman De Gare [DVD] (DVD)

The great Claude Lelouch (A man and a woman)decided to gather with the great names of the Franch Cinema with this memorable film, that works out at several levels.

First at all it's a personal gaze to the Noir Film but retouched with the majestic elegance and joir de vivre so typical from the Fifties, in which the golden names of Jules Dassin (Rififi), Rene Clement (Purle noon), Claude Chabrol (This man must die) come to our mind. But, let's say it at once : it's a deserved homage in Hitchcok's memory.

On the other hand, the film is also a tribute to Dumas, Balzac, Roman Gary, Hemingway, Highsmith and the literature in its braod sense.

Lelouch did without of a great budget to build a solid script without special effects or inneccesary bloody scenes to create the atmosphere and the tension around a sinister lady who has known to cheat the entire world.

The true behind stages is a humble but clever journalist who is the real author of a group of widely knwon bestsellers. Since that non so ehtical perspective, the film begins to show the fame in many cases is not linked with the talent but with how to get "the coup de grace".

Since that perspective, the movie describes a full rounded circle in which the fate makes the justice and revenge, (two concepts that usually have nothing in common) may collide.

Don't miss this extraordinary movie. One of the top ten of 2007.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roman De Gare, December 26, 2009

By 

Merry M. Livingston "Merry" (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Roman De Gare [DVD] (DVD)

This movie is excellent. So very well produced and acted. It's what a mystery should be. Never a dull moment in this movie.