Ghost Writers in the Brine

It’s too bad you can’t shove a new theatrical release into your beach bag, as if it were a well-worn paperback. If you’re in the mood for such a read, the twisty new French thriller Roman de Gare would look great next to your bottle of sunscreen and towels. From your sandy spot, you could imagine yourself on the well-appointed yacht where the climax takes place. Your beachfront could become Cannes with just a little shove of your imagination. In a delightful though probably accidental coincidence, Roman de Gare, is playing in theaters just as the Cannes Film Festival is in full swing.

Claude Lelouch, the 70 year-old writer/director behind the new film is a Cannes regular. It’s been a long time since his heyday when he won the Palme D’Or, Golden Globe and Oscar (all for A Man and a Woman, 1966), but he’s still got surprises up his sleeve. In fact, or purposeful fiction to be more precise, when Roman de Gare first screened for Cannes consideration last year, his name wasn’t on it. He was working under a pseudonym… an impish if artistically driven choice: he wanted people to judge the film as a film rather than as “a Lelouch”.

I share the amusing anecdote because it’s an appropriate bit of mischief for a film that is, to some extent, about the mysteries of authorship...

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