Good movie but grossly overrated

Better Late Then Never

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

In this French thriller, a ghost-writer and a school teacher go missing and a serial killer escapes from prison, although it's not known which one of these three the main character is. The premise is intriguing but the setup is somewhat convoluted. Lelouch has been making films for a long time but he seems unsure here of where he wants to go with this film. Perhaps someone like Claude Chabrol could have made this more interesting. Ultimately, the film tries to be too clever and does not deliver on its initial promise. Pinon is a peculiar-looking actor (he could pass for Jean-Paul Belmondo's midget son) and seems an odd choice to play the protagonist here.

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.

The successful novelist Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is interrogated in the police station about the disappearance of her ghost-writer. A serial-killer escapes from a prison in Paris. A missing school teacher leaves his wife and children. In the road, the annoying and stressed hairdresser Hughette (Audrey Dana) is left in a gas station by her fiancé Paul while driving to the poor farm of her family in the country. A mysterious man (Dominique Pinon) offers a ride to her and she invites him to assume the identity of Paul during 24 hours to not disappoint her mother. Who might be the unknown man and what is real and what is fiction?"Roman de Gare" is an intriguing and suspenseful story with many twists and a reasonable resolution. The first part while the identity of the aspirant magician is unknown is great, with a good performance of the unknown and gorgeous Audrey Dana in the role of a complex character. When Pierre Laclos vanishes and Judith's novel becomes a best-seller, I really expected a better explanation for what happened in the yacht. But the movie is very entertaining and recommended. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Crimes de Autor" ("Crimes of Author")

This movie is almost a conceptual piece, yet it's compulsively entertaining, suspenseful, and tightly wound. Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is a famous crime writer who has a funny way of finding material for her novels. Actually she has a ghost writer. But she doesn't tell anybody that. We see a French TV show featuring writers with new books and learn Judith has a new one. Is she guilty of a crime? We also see her being questioned at the Paris police headquarters about her possible connection to a pedophile serial killer who lures his victims by doing magic tricks. Then we watch a little man speeding out into the country, and doing magic tricks. At a rest stop, a young woman named Huguette (Audrey Dana) has a roaring fight with her fiancée and he drives off, in her car, and leaves her to spend the night, watched by the little man. She was on the way with Paul (Cyrille Eldin), a doctor, her fiancé, to meet her parents at their primitive farm.Louis, (Dominique Pinon) does a card trick, and gives Huguette a ride. Is he a killer? It turns out Huguette has a connection with Judith Ralitzer, of sorts. She's a hairdresser, and did her hair. Well, her nails anyway. And then Louis says he's Judith's ghost writer. And he's collecting ideas for her next novel. Huguette, the fiancée dumped by her man all night at a rest stop, is a good premise for one, he thinks. He agrees to a great favor: he will go to Huguette's family's farm with her and pretend to be the finance. She has a beautiful teenage daughter. . .What's real, and what's made up? The fun of it is that the movie surprises us with false trails at every twist and turn. But it reveals its secrets at the end, more or less.What makes it all more interesting is that Lelouch is a confirmed improviser in his film-making, and the meandering path of the movie, dominated by this ghost writer (or is he a serial killer?) who's making up a story for a famous crime novelist is a kind of metaphor for Lelouche's own method of creation. But what keeps this from being gimmicky, or uninvolving, or fluffy, as some of Lelouch's other films, especially the recent ones, have seemed, is that the story is told with some of the same vividness that made Moll's With a Friend Like Harry compelling and creepy.Pinon is a very busy and successful film actor in France, but not well known to Americans, though he's in The Return of Martin Guerre and the Jeunet/Caro film, Delicatessen. He has enormous flexibility; he's half cute and appealing and half creepy. He carries the film. But Audrey Dana is also important, and has a similar flexibility. She seems a neurotic rageaholic, but she can be warm and beautiful at the drop of a hat. But as Lelouch knew it would be, the film is anchored by Fanny Ardant. The famous actress doubling as a famous writer, living in her glamorous (though dubious) world is central to the rich effect of Roman de Gare (the name means cheap crime romance, the kind of pulp fiction you used to buy in train stations). And the story is by Lelouch, but he passed it off as being by somebody else, till the movie got to Cannes last year. Then he let the secret out.The sound track features the songs of Gilbert Becaud.Roman de Gare/AKA/Crossed Tracks is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, Feb. 29-March 9, 2008. It's the opening night film.