It's always a pleasure to see someone who has gone through a bad patch return to form so I'm glad to be able to salute this new - albeit now two years old - entry from Claude Lelouch. There are elements of both David Mamet and Harlan Coben in the labyrinthine plotting that's hard to second guess - indeed Lelouch seems to be playfully teasing the viewer by deliberately offering instant solutions that are clearly red herrings. A newsflash recounts the escape from prison of a paedophile/murderer who charms his victims via magic tricks and minutes later Dominic Pinon accosts a child and her parents, 'produces' a bunch of flowers from nowhere and bestows them upon the child encouraging the viewer to make four from a two and two that in truth total seventeen. Meanwhile Audrey Dana, en route to her parents' remote and primitive farm, is driving her boyfriend to distraction so much so that he dumps her in the gas station where Pinon is hanging around for no discernible reason and soon performs a card trick for her. But this is only the beginning, hardly has the viewer decided that Laclos (Pinon) IS the magician/killer than a husband reports her teacher husband missing and Pinon, who has mentioned to Dana that he was once a teacher, is being tapped for a new role; when Dana tells him she is both a hairdresser/manicurist and fan of novelist Fanny Ardant, whose nails she recently buffed, Pinon claims to be Ardant's ghost-writer. And so it goes, layer upon layer so much so that Lelouch might as well have written it on onionskin parchment. What it is is not a thriller, not a romance, not a suspense, not a drama but a Total Delight. See it.
Review of Roman de gare
