Dominique Pinon as Pierre Laclos and Audrey Dana as Huguette in Claude Lelouch’s Roman de Gare.

Samuel Goldwyn Films

A famous author is haunted by a ghost in director Claude Lelouch’s twisty melodrama Roman de Gare.

No it’s not one of those specters that go clanking through the halls at night, rattling doorknobs and appearing suddenly out of nowhere. After all, the 71-year-old Lelouch, who has made more than 30 feature films in his long career, is still most famous for his 1966 film A Man and a Woman, and the relationships between men and women have been his stock in filmmaking trade.

At the start of Roman de Gare, author Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is being interrogated by the police, who suspect her in the disappearance of her ghost writer, Pierre Laclos (Dominique Pinon). Pierre, who had actually written Judith’s popular books for several years under her name, disappeared off Judith’s yacht one night on the French Riviera and is presumed drowned. Foul play is suspected, and the fingers point to Judith once it is learned that Laclos, who has been content to write under her name for several best-selling books, had planned to release his latest work under his own name. He has been missing for a year, the book was later published with Judith listed as its author and it has been her most successful book yet.

Most of the film is told in flashback, but from Pierre’s point of view as it wraps around a long subplot that involves the prison escape of a notorious pedophile-rapist-serial-killer, a woman who is abandoned by her fiancé at a highway gas station after a long argument, and the strange, slightly creepy looking man who insists on giving her a ride to visit her family at a mountain farm. The sequence is played for tension. Although Huguette (Audrey Dana) is wary of the man, she eventually relents.

Hold your breath! For is the stranger really the author who writes all of Judith’s novels, as he says he is, or is he the serial killer? Lelouch plays it close to the vest, toying with the audience about the man’s true nature by including a lot of danger signals. Yet along the way, Huguette has convinced the stranger to accompany her to her family farm and pretend he’s her fiancé so she won’t be embarrassed by turning up without her future husband. But the stranger’s surreptitious note-taking at the farm and his offhand remark about how the entire family will be dead by the next day, gives one the jitters, especially since Huguette seems to be falling for him.

Yet this subplot is all an elaborate setup to what follows, a bit confusing at times, although Huguette eventually provides a key clue in the disappearance of Pierre. The film unravels slowly. And once Lelouch lays all his cards on the table as to what’s really happening later on, the outcome may seem somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Frankly, I’d figured out where the plot was headed long before it got there, but not the sudden, shocking resolution of one problem. It makes for a startling moment, but one that seems a desperate attempt to end the thing.

***Roman de Gare

Starring: Dominique Pinon, Fanny Ardant, Audrey Dana. In French with English subtitles.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com