Roman de Gare

Clever-clever French stalwart Claude Lelouch chose to shoot his latest under a pseudonym (only revealing himself later on) because he felt humiliated by the failure of his previous film. It’s a shame, then, that from such intriguing origins arrives a fairly ordinary Hitchcockian mystery thriller about authorship and identity. The film works best as a showcase for rumple-faced actor Dominique Pinon (best known for his role in ‘Delicatessen’), shrewdly cast as a genial oddball who could be a serial killer, a magician or the ghost writer for a bestselling author (Fanny Ardant). The ball starts rolling when he picks up a jilted hairdresser from a motorway lay-by and agrees to pretend to be her husband. To disclose any more would reduce the fun of negotiating the criss-crossing timeframes, backstories and expertly mounted decoys, all of which Lelouch handles with a proficiency that reflects his 50 years in the game. But, tension and plausibility fritter away in the final third.