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Roman de Gare is a film that begins with so much potential, but quickly fritters it away and veers off on a path of utter awfulness. Roman de Gare is the story of two strangers – Huguette and some nameless man played by Dominique Pinon (Diva, Amélie) - who meet by chance at a rest stop when Huguette’s fiancée drives off after a fight, leaving her stranded. Dominique Pinon offers Huguette a ride, which she only hesitantly accepts after he performs a card trick and she takes a good 7-hour nap in the rest terminal. To Huguette, a pretty, young woman, such a seemingly kind, good Samaritan offer of a ride by a mysterious middle-aged man – a stranger – seems suspicious.

Who is this man and can he be trusted? He claims that he recently left his wife, children, and elementary school teaching job, and has been driving aimlessly for the past three days. He also claims to be the ghost writer behind a famous author’s work, a famous author who happens to be a personal favourite of Huguette’s. Several other subplots intersect with this one. A woman, with child, searches for her husband, an elementary school teacher, who has vanished without word. The radio has news reports about a serial killer who lures his victims in with charismatic magic tricks. And the famous author (Fanny Ardant) publishes a new book, to critical acclaim. Could Dominique Pinon be all of these men? Or is he none of them?

Dominique Pinon is unassuming and appears like a harmless, insecure, lonely middle-aged man. But we are not certain that we can trust him. Huguette is headed home to introduce her fiancée to her family, only she no longer has a fiancée at hand, so she enlists Pinon to pretend to be her fiancée. He is endlessly kind and obliging toward her, and the scenes of mistaken identities which ensue with her family, are wonderful. But the suspense is only really half there and we are not really worried about this Pinon character, nor do we really care. On their way to the parents’ house, they get stopped by a police officer, an old friend of Huguette’s, -it’s a small town – who has been instructed to stop all cars with Paris plates because of the mysterious magic-trick serial killer on the loose. Huguette sweet talks the officer into letting them pass without looking at Pinon’s license and registration; we worry that Huguette has lost her one opportunity to save herself from a potential murderer and that she is merely getting herself in deeper and deeper.

Unfortunately, this suspense never amounts to anything. And when Pinon’s true nature is finally revealed, it is totally anticlimactic. From here, the plot goes incredibly downhill and turns into a cheap search for justice, revenge, and romance, with cringe-worthy dialogue and horribly stupid scenarios. This dive into terribleness happens after about an hour into the film, and we are stuck in this descent for the forty painful remaining minutes of the film. Writer-director Claude Lelouch seems to misunderstand his material, focussing on the weakest parts of the story rather than improving upon and building up the almost intriguing suspense laid out in the first third of the film. With messy visuals – the film looks like it is shot on a home digital camera – and a script that starts off with mediocrity and only get worse, not even the wonderful Dominique Pinon and Fanny Ardant can save this film from its mediocrity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Events, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.