Roman de gare (2007)
4/10
Do you like to be misled?
21 April 2009
If you enjoy mysteries in which the author misleads you, you might like this movie. Technically it's fine, and the players are agreeable, although the leading man doesn't look like a leading man and may not even fit the conventional definition. This I would consider a very positive point in another movie.

But for this one I had a problem. The writer/director has complete control over the "reality" of the film, and so can do anything he wants with it, but I found the manipulation to be irritating. I can't go into details because I want to keep spoiler-free, but there is suspense which is suspenseful only because the creator decided to mislead, and some of the action involved didn't really make much sense. Now when Hitchcock misleads us in Vertigo, for instance, he gives us a resolution which makes everything we've seen up to then suddenly come together and make sense. Here, when we discover we've been misled, we've just been misled and what we've seen and heard to mislead us played no other role than to mislead.

That applies more or less to the first part of the film. The second part is a more conventional murder mystery, which I found extremely predictable in its "suprise" resolution.
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