Smarting from the critical and commercial failure of his
two-thirds-completed "La Genre humain" trilogy, director Claude Lelouch (A
Man And A Woman)
premièred Roman De Gare under a pseudonym, a fitting debut for a movie that is rife with
deception onscreen and off. Oozing brittle hauteur, Fanny Ardant plays an
author of glossy thrillers who has just released her first literary novel. But
as Ardant savors the praise of critics, Lelouch cuts away to an encounter
between a distraught woman (Audrey Dana) whose fiancé has just dumped her by
the side of the road,† and a man
(Dominique Pinon) who claims to be Ardant's long-term ghostwriter.
In Roman De Gare, no one is who they say they are, and identities are picked
up and discarded as the need arises. Without withdrawing the possibility that
Pinon is who he claims, Lelouch also stirs up suspicion that he may be an
escaped serial killer known as the Magician, who lures his teenage victims with
magic tricks, or a Parisian schoolteacher who has abruptly deserted his
family—or, perhaps, some combination of all three. While the audience is
hunting for clues to Pinon's identity, Dana enlists him to pose as her
estranged husband-to-be, adding yet another layer of deceit. Even the
pun-riddled dialogue does double duty, although much of the wordplay is lost in
translation. (Ardant's literate thriller is called Dieu Est Un Autre, a strained pun on Rimbaud.)
Shuffling storylines and shifting time frames, Lelouch
empties out his bag of tricks, hoping viewers will be so entranced by his
misdirections that they won't notice the occasional cheat. But the movie's
bubbly charms start to fizzle as the layers peel back. Lelouch is fine as long
as he keeps his hands moving, but at the final flourish, he has nothing up his
sleeves. Roman De Gare's neatest trick is Pinon's performance, which draws out a hitherto
unseen leading-man allure. Pinon's oversize features have long been a boon to
filmmakers with a love of the grotesque (see: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who has yet
to make a feature without him). Here, Pinon runs with the chance to play
against type, letting his past catalogue of freaks and madmen fill in the underlying
sense of unease. At this point, the strangest thing he can do is play normal.