This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Early on, French New Wave directors like Jean Luc Godard -- “Breathless,” 1959 -- and Francois Truffaut -- “Shoot the Piano Player,” 1960 -- delighted in taking American crime movies and simultaneously spoofing them and paying them the deepest homage. The result was something new and exciting and very French.
Claude Lelouch was part of the New Wave, but he seemed a lot more interested in that more traditional of French genres, the love story, than in existential crime stories. His best known movie has the unequivocal title of “A Man and a Woman” (1966), and it is one of a couple of dozen tales of amour he has directed over the years.
But Lelouch’s newest film, “Roman de Gare,” takes an American crime genre, the serial killer movie, and gives it a series of unpredictable twists that makes it a delight of cinematic legerdemain, a gripping tale of crime and punishment that is filled with sly humor.
“Roman de Gare” is also, by the way, a love story, but it takes a while to figure that out. Everything about this movie is tricky, even the title. A “Roman de Gare” is the kind of light, predictable reading you would pick up at a train station or an airport. But there is very little that is predictable about this particular “Roman de Gare.”
The film opens with a flash forward to a police station, where best-selling author Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant, widow of Truffaut) is being interrogated about a real serial killer who seems suspiciously like a character from one of her novels. He is named the Magician, and he entices his victims by performing magic tricks for them.
Then Lelouch cuts back in time to a highway rest stop, where a hairdresser named Huguette (Audrey Dana) and her physician fiancé argue and fight until he finally hops in his fancy car and leaves the poor, frazzled young woman stranded somewhere in the middle of provincial France. She is offered a ride by a stranger, played by Dominique Pinon, a squash-faced actor best known for surrealistic, humorously gruesome French films like “Delicatessen” and “City of Lost Children.”
Pinon looks like what you would get if you struck Jean-Paul Belmondo with an ugly stick; and when he starts wagging his eyelids at Huguette and showing her his card tricks, we figure the poor girl is done for. She doesn’t trust the man, but she is stranded and she has another problem – she is a single mother on her way to the home of her parents. They and her young daughter are expecting to meet her prosperous fiancé, who is going to solve all the family’s problems by marrying her.
Finally, in desperation, she accepts the offer of a ride. And she hatches a scheme – she will persuade the stranger to pretend to be her fiancé when they arrive at her childhood home. Sure, we think. If she lives that long.
He agrees.
As they drive along, he discovers that Huguette is a big fan of the novels of Judith Ralitzer; and he spins a rather astonishing tale, claiming that he gets paid to write all of Ralitzer’s books. At this point, we are increasingly unsure what to believe – and the tale is just getting underway.
Much of the early part of the movie is almost nervous with visual distraction, and often the camera films the interaction of the characters through a window or in a reflection. Something’s happening, and we’re not sure what it is. And we can’t quite get close enough to the truth to grasp it. “Roman de Gare” turns into a spinning ball of mirrors, and at one point, in a striking post-modern touch, it appears that we are watching a dramatization of the latest Judith Ralitzer novel.
“Roman de Gare” is often puzzling, at least temporarily, and sometimes mysterious, but never unintentionally confusing. The film includes a considerable amount of comedy, including a long scene at the country home of Huguette’s parents, a wooden shack at the end of a mud track that looks like something out of the Deep Ozark novels of Missouri writer Daniel Woodrell, only somewhat less elegant. This French hillbilly comic interlude comes to a fearful turn when the stranger goes off with Huguette’s innocent daughter to fish for trout. Hours later, as darkness creeps in, the two have failed to return, and Huguette, skittish under the best of circumstances, is hysterical with terror and guilt for letting her daughter go off in the woods with a stranger.
From that point, the movie flicks back and forth between suspense and comedy – and, briefly, bedroom farce – in a deliciously entertaining way.
“The more I go to the movies,” Claude Lelouch once said, “The more I like French movies.”
Well, Truffaut is dead and Godard lost in dialectic. French movies can be unbearable, self-conscious as a lovestruck teenager and as filled with sophomoric philosophizing, but not this one. *Intelligent yet hugely entertaining movies like “Roman de Gare” make you appreciate Gallic cinema again. It’s as if the New Wave was still new.
Opens June 20.
Harper Barnes, St. Louis, is a regular contributor to the Beacon. His new book, "Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement," will be published soon.