Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 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
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.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Roman de Gare tells three stories in one., June 2, 2008
"The term roman de gare refers to popular literature. The title was inspired by some reviews written about my work in recent years, which compared my movies to photo romances or romans de gare (books sold in train stations: it designates an easy-read for the traveler, romance or thriller best-sellers). I said to myself: 'Why not, I will demonstrate that if you extract the best from this genre, it can very well compete with more glorious ones.' I played the game"--Claude Lelouch.
Prolific and gifted French filmmaker Claude Lelouch is best known for A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), Rendezvous, and his 1981 masterpiece, Les Uns et les Autres. Directed under a pseudonym (Hervé Picard), his latest (and 49th) film, Roman de Gare (Crossed Tracks) (2007) tells the intriguing and suspenseful story of a popular crime novelist, Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant), her ghost writer, Pierre Laclos (Dominique Pinon), and a complicated hairdresser, Hughette (Audrey Dana), whose lives intersect at a service station, where Hughette has been abandoned by her fiancé, Paul (Cyrille Eldin) because she smokes. Meanwhile, a pedophile serial-killer a.k.a. "The Magician" escapes from a Paris prison, and a school teacher leaves his wife and children for no apparent reason. (Ultimately, combining mystery, comedy and romance, Lelouch's multi-layered film tells three stories in one. "Roman de Gare is a mixture of genres," Lelouch says, "as are most of my films, but here probably more than usual. I keep changing moods; I play a game with my viewers, asking them to be active participants in a playful movie. Of course, there is one thread that links my films together, which is love. It's the most essential subject and one which plays an active role in Roman de Gare.") Things get really intriguing when Hughette asks Pierre to save her reputation by impersonating her fiancé. Although they make an unlikely couple, it is fascinating to think the two might actually fall in love. Audrey Dana is mesmerizing in her film debut (especially in one scene, where she demonstrates that even in a subtle French film, a shotgun speaks louder than words), and her performance with Pinon is completely riveting.
G. Merritt
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