ROMAN DE GARE - French Fest & Cafe Cinematheque

Country of Origin: France
Year: 2007
Runtime: 103 min
Language: French w/English Sub-titles
Director: Claude Lelouch
Producer:
Cast: Fanny Ardant, Dominique Pinon, Audrey Dana, Michele Bernier

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Synopsis

Shelly Issacs returns with a delightful mystery thriller and Cafe Cinematheque Int'l.

Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman may be one of the silliest love songs in the canon of French fluff, but 42 years on, it gets a beguiling makeover in this new souffle from the director, who seizes the day both to trade on and shake off his enduring reputation as France's reigning romantic airhead. Roman de Gare which loosely translates as "airport novel" and was written and directed under the pseudonym Herve Picarde is stuffed with fakers who run the gamut from hapless to charming to vaguely sinister. At the center is an unlikely couple: a celebrity-mad provincial neurotic (the appealing Audrey Dana) who's either a hairdresser or a hooker, and a pug-faced stranger (Delicatessen star Dominique Pinon) who's either a serial killer, a teacher on the run from his wife and kids, or the ghostwriter for a famous novelist (played by Fanny Ardant, a bony update of A Man And a Woman star Anouk Aimee). Slyly bookmarking the early audience hit that also got him slimed by elite critics, Lelouch shoots his characters through rainy car windows or chugging back Burgundy on a fancy yacht. But this goofy tale of self-emancipation, a love story made by a mature man wise to the possibilities of the improbable, is also a thriller with an unexpectedly dark edge, littered with winks in the direction of that other murder mystery, Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1947 Quai des Orfa¨vres, whose police inspector happened to be a certain Monsieur Picard.

Come early and enjoy complimentary coffee & croissants!