But the film never shakes the clammy grip of the overarching drama. It's a literary thriller in the sense that its subject is the complicated process of literary invention, but Lelouch keeps us constantly in the dark about what we're watching: the process of creation of the story-in-a-story or the story itself.
Such description makes the film sound hard to follow, but it's not. Plenty remains unclear until the final scene, but it's a pleasure to sink into your seat and go along with it.
Within a few minutes, several narratives are set in train. Linking all is a character played by the squash-faced Pinon, an acclaimed comic actor: the trick is that we are not entirely sure which of the unclaimed roles is his and whether the film's events are taking place simultaneously or sequentially.
Movies in which nothing is what it seems are ten a penny, but this one adds something to the mix: we know quite a lot about the lies people are telling and the pretences they are maintaining; the problem is the fictions we don't know about. Lelouch, in short, understands Hitchcock's No. 1 rule about suspense: it is much scarier while you're waiting for a gun to go off than when it goes off.
The final twist, of course, is less about one character outwitting another than about how the storyteller outwits the audience.
Peter Calder
Note:
"Roman de gare" (railway station novel) translates as "airport novel".
Cast
: Dominique Pinon, Fanny Ardant, Cyrille Eldin, Audrey Dana
Director
: Claude Lelouch
Running time
: 103 mins
Rating
: M (offensive language, sexual references). In French with English subtitles
