FROM CLAUDE LELOUCH, DIRECTOR OF A MAN AND A WOMAN

ROMAN DE GARE

SHOWTIMES

Responding to critics who have compared his works to “photo romances,” or romans de gare, which literally translates to genre literature sold in train stations, Claude Lelouch has engaged his critics with his latest film determined to prove that popular does not always equal bad. Unabashedly formulaic in its use of genre characters and plot devices, Roman de gare is a literary thriller of Hitchcockian proportions. Set in the literary milieu of the Parisian literati, the film opens up with best-selling crime novelist, Judith Ratzinger, accused of the murder of her ghost-writer, Pierre — who may or may not be a serial killer passing off his real life crimes as literary fodder for Ratzinger’s novels. Edited in flashback, the film follows Pierre on a cross Parisian jaunt as he meets, Huguette, a jilted girlfriend abandoned by her fiancée at a highway rest-stop. Disarmed by her charming savior, Huguette naively asks Pierre to impersonate her fiancée for the weekend at her parents’ farm. What follows is an intricate set piece of genre mash-ups that ends in a denouement of epic domino-set proportions. Nothing is as it seems in this genre-bending thriller that raises questions regarding art and the creative process and as well as the nature of love, lies, and identity. -Gene Berezin

France, 2007, 103 min., color, in French with English subtitles