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Not Just a Trashy Novel
By bukkhead | June 16, 2008
FILM REVIEW: ‘ROMAN DE GARE’
Written by Claude Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven
Directed by Claude Lelouch
Rated R
103 mins.
Roman de Gare, a new film from Claude Lelouch, takes a mixture of complicated plot elements and expertly weaves them around and into one another, so that at any time, the audience can’t be sure what is the truth and what is fiction. It’s a delicate thread, one that both rewards and defies the astute viewer who picks up the details and pays attention to every nuance. For example, Pierre Laclos, as the story unfolds, might be a serial rapist, a magician, a ghost writer, or merely an estranged husband, or even a combination of a few of these. His character shares the same name as the novelist who wrote Les Liaisons dangereuses: is this a red herring, or is there a deeper meaning there?
And although this delicacy makes for a complicated “plot” (or whatever you call the meta-story that writhes above the actual truthful events) Roman finds ways to assert itself in very strong characters. Audrey Dana as Huguette has one of those faces that fans of foreign films will swear they recognize, although to date she’s only appeared in two other feature length films. Dana plays Huguette as something like a force of nature— passionate, intense, but gripped with self-loathing buttressed nevertheless with feminine pride. Lies come easily to Huguette, not from any kind of pathology, or a manipulative nature, but to hide secrets that are not necessary for everyone to know. She’s the quintessential country girl who’s been hardened into something prettier , but brittle, by life in the city.
Balancing Dana’s newcomer status is Fanny Ardent as Judith Ralitzer, a novelist whose latest work has really put her over the top of as a “best seller of best sellers.” This time, the face you recognize is indeed one you’ve seen, as Ardent has played in such familiar films as 8 Femmes and Ridicule. While Huguette wears her heart on her sleeve, Judith is more subtle, calm, and her lies are indeed manipulative, in the extreme. As the viewer moves between knowing, and not knowing, and thinking they know what is going on, at any point Judith seems capable of everything that she is suspected of having done, if only because if the quiet calm and solid poise she portrays.
Dominique Pinion, as Laclos, is, of course, the biggest mystery, and perhaps the most dangerous, a character capable of using the truth to tell lies, a man who can create a fictional world around him that becomes, through careful balance and mere poetry, more real than the actual world on which it is based. Although he’s aged a bit since 1991’s Delicatessan, Pinion’s almost goofy face is immediately recognizable, which only adds to the mystery of who he really he is, what he is really capable of doing.
Roman is an ongoing balancing act, a film that builds a mystery on-the-fly, as if the audience is watching a novelist at work, a writer who himself doesn’t know who did what or how everything will become resolved.
(This review was printed in the Newport Mercury.)
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