Hat trick

This movie is almost a conceptual piece, yet it's compulsively entertaining, suspenseful, and tightly wound. Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is a famous crime writer who has a funny way of finding material for her novels. Actually her secretary, Pierre Laclos (Dominique Pinon) is her ghost writer. But she doesn't tell anybody that. We see a French TV show featuring writers with new books and learn Judith has a new one. Is she guilty of a crime? We also see her being questioned at the Paris police headquarters about her possible connection to a pedophile serial killer who lures his victims by doing magic tricks. Then we watch a little man speeding out into the country, and doing magic tricks. At a rest stop, a young woman named Huguette (Audrey Dana) has a roaring fight with her fiancee and he drives off, in her car, and leaves her to spend the night, watched by the little man. She was on the way with Paul (Cyrille Eldin), a doctor, her fiance, to meet her parents at their primitive farm.

Louis, (Pinon) does a card trick, and gives Huguette a ride. Is he a killer? It turns out Huguette has a connection with Judith Ralitzer, of sorts. She's a hairdresser, and did her hair. Well, her nails anyway. And then Louis says he's Judith's ghost writer. And he's collecting ideas for her next novel. Huguette, the fiancee dumped by her man all night at a rest stop, is a good premise for one, he thinks. He agrees to a great favor: he will go to Huguette's family's farm with her and pretend to be the finance. She has a beautiful teenage daughter. . .

What's real, and what's made up? The fun of it is that the movie surprises us with false trails at every twist and turn. But it reveals its secrets at the end, more or less.

What makes it all more interesting is that Lelouch is a confirmed improviser in his filmmaking, and the meandering path of the movie, dominated by this ghost writer (or is he a serial killer?) who's making up a story for a famous crime novelist is a kind of metaphor for Lelouch's own method of creation. But what keeps this from being gimmicky, or uninvolving, or fluffy, as some of Lelouch's other films, especially the recent ones, have seemed, is that the story is told with some of the same vividness that made Moll's With a Friend Like Harry compelling and creepy.

Pinon is a very busy and successful film actor in France, but not well known to Americans, though he's in The Return of Martin Guerre and the Jeunet/Caro film, Delicatessen. He has enormous flexibility; he's half cute and appealing and half creepy. He carries the film. But Audrey Dana is also important, and has a similar flexibility. She seems a neurotic rageaholic, but she can be warm and beautiful at the drop of a hat. But as Lelouch knew it would be, the film is anchored by Fanny Ardant. The famous actress doubling as a famous writer, living in her glamorous (though dubious) world is central to the rich effect of Roman de Gare (the name means cheap crime romance, the kind of pulp fiction you used to buy in train stations). And the story is by Lelouch, but he passed it off as being by somebody else, till the movie got to Cannes last year. Then he let the secret out.

The sound track features the songs of Gilbert Becaud.

Roman de Gare/AKA/Crossed Tracks is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, Feb. 29-March 9, 2008. It's the opening night film.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.