Ketrivie
It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Helloturia
I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.
DipitySkillful
an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.
Lachlan Coulson
This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.
gridoon2018
The first half of "Roman De Gare" is riveting: the way writer-director Claude Lelouch, aided and abetted by Dominique Pinon's masterfully ambivalent performance, keeps us considering several different possibilities, and expecting the worst, brings to mind the classic Alfred Hitchcock rule about how suspense is created when you show the bomb WITHOUT having it explode. But after one key question is answered, the film loses some momentum, and the final revelations are not quite as thrilling as you'd wish them to be. Still, it's beautifully photographed, and the two women completing the main acting trio - newcomer Audrey Dana and veteran Fanny Ardant - are also exceptional. **1/2 out of 4.
Gunter Sharp
This is a delectable story about various characters whose paths cross in unusual ways. The film begins with an auto driver furiously rushing through the streets of Paris at night, violating numerous traffic rules. A high-speed drive through an underpass, with the mesmerizing stripes in a lane-separating gore, evoke the manner of Lady Di's fatal crash years before. When Haguette (Audrey Dana), a hairdresser, claims to have done Lady Di's hair, one wonders if the director inserted the underpass scene with that in mind. The movie goes a little overboard in presenting the beauty of the female leads: After a heated quarrel with her husband, Haguette is stranded at a highway fuel station where she spends several lonely hours. Then after a lift by a stranger, she gets out of the car, and lo and behold, her hair and makeup are perfect. What magic mascara that doesn't smudge is she wearing? Similarly for the best-seller author Judith (Fanny Ardent): soft focus presents her visage in perfect form. The director, whose film themes tend to focus on love, can perhaps be forgiven for such liberties. The director is best at keeping the viewer guessing. Is the stranger who gave Haguette a lift the pedophile who attracts his victims by doing magic tricks? Just what are the two perfect crimes described in the latest novel by Judith? The packaging of the DVD at Blockbuster seemed new, so perhaps it just came to the U.S. market. The DVD contains a bonus section that reviews Lelouch's film career. This added feature contains little-known tidbits, like the fact that his first several films were failures. His success, at age 27, with "Un homme et une femme" launched him into a career of some 30 films.
Kara Dahl Russell
ROMAN DE GARE has a lot going for it. Start with one of France's biggest stars, "jolie/laid" (beautiful/ugly) Fanny Ardant. Add Domique Pignon, the brilliant and quirky circus performer turned actor who starred in DELICATESSIN, CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, and AMELIE. Add Audrey Dana as Hugette, a lovely "rocker chick next door" type & hairdresser wannabe, who gives a knock-your-socks-off performance in one of the most interesting victim roles written for a woman in years. Add a fantastic, complex, multi-layered mystery-thriller script that holds your interest and is tight-as-a-drum.Toss in a serial killer on the loose, a husband who has walked out on his job/wife/and child, a ghost writer for a famous author, a handsome policeman in love with an overweight housewife, a murder, and a brother/sister magic act. Finally, the core of this film takes us to the kind of French countryside we never see... French "hill country" that is like a ramshackle farm in West Virginia, where education is poor, and the house a modified stable.Instead of being a mess, all of these elements pull together so simply in a way that feels everyday and natural; because ultimately this film is about the complexity of modern life.For those who like to look deeper, we have the significant, meaningful themes of "wanting to run away from your life," and the modern inability to know who anyone really is - the essential modern mistrust. Ardant's character doesn't even know who she is herself, and it is shown in persistent yet such subtle ways throughout.For those who don't like to look deeply, the good news is that you don't have to. ROMAN DE GARE glides along and keeps you engaged throughout. It keeps you guessing... we know we are seeing one of the books being talked about, but we don't even know for sure which book we are watching.The film SWIMMING POOL mined similar territory in the literary world and has a mind-bending ending that alters your perception of the whole film. We are set up for that kind of ending here, and I left feeling disappointed. It is only now, several days later that I feel this is one of the most deft and well orchestrated films I've seen in years. We go from a yacht in Cannes to a highway rest stop, and there is no "comment" on the social contrasts, it just is. To have it all feel organic and natural is the real magicians art - the work of a confident and mature filmmaker.The production values are as high as you would expect with big stars in the leads. The costuming touches say so much. The hairdresser's trashy trendy high-heeled boots, Ardan'ts frankly fake wigs and obvious foundation makeup are the touches that speak to the inner personality. The fact that "Hugette" is the smallest woman is worth noticing.Really modern. Really complex. Really entertaining. Really Real. See it.
Chris Knipp
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 she has a 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 fiancée 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 fiancé, to meet her parents at their primitive farm.Louis, (Dominique 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 fiancée 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 film-making, 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 Lelouche'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.