April 19, 2008 | Forty-two years after he enraptured romantics everywhere with his glossy-dreamy A Man and a Woman, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch continues to focus on the serendipitous twists of fate that can turn total strangers into loving couples. The big difference in his latest film – Roman de Gare, the closing-night attraction of the 2008 Houston International Film Festival – is that, this time, the lead characters may be involved in a fatal attraction.

Consider: Huguette (Audrey Dana) says she is a beautician. But maybe she’s a prostitute. Or maybe a beautician whose customers are prostitutes. After she’s dumped by her boyfriend at a highway service station, she’s approached by a solicitous stranger (Dominique Pinon) who offers to give her a lift in his car.

On the road, the stranger reveals he is the ghostwriter for a famous novelist (French film icon Fanny Ardant) who, alas, never has time to actually write her own books. But no, he confesses, that’s really not true: He’s actually a schoolteacher, fleeing a dreary job and a loveless marriage.

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s a serial killer recently escaped from prison.

Lelouch keeps his audience guessing throughout the cleverly deceptive twists and turns of Roman de Gare. But he promised to hold no tricks up his sleeve – as long as his interviewer played fair – while chatting about his latest feature.

Q. I guess I have to start with the most obvious question: What is a Roman de Gare?

A. It’s a term we use in France to describe a certain kind of genre literature, popular literature. Books sold in train stations, like romance or thriller best-sellers. It’s meant to designate an easy read for the traveler who only wants to be entertained during a journey. The title was inspired by some reviews I have received in recent years, where the critics compared my movies to romans de gare. I said to myself: “Fine. I will demonstrate that if you take the best from this genre, it can compete with more glorious ones.”

Q. Did you intend the title to be a way of thumbing your nose at your critics?

A. I admit that it was a sort of provocation, a reply to a long, ongoing debate. I do have an awkward relationship with the elite, ever since A Man and a Woman was so popular. For them, what works commercially must be bad. But Roman de Gare also is an open letter to my audience, to those people who often encouraged me and have been moved by my movies.

Q. Appropriately enough for a movie about a possible ghostwriter, you started out trying to direct Roman de Gare under an alias. How far did you get with that?

A. I wanted to see whether one of my movies could be judged for what it really was, on its own merits, and not as “another Claude Lelouch film.” So I used the name Hervé Picard, and asked everyone involved – the actors, the technicians – to go along with me. Truly, I though this joke would stand for about a week. But they did keep the secret. And the funny thing is, no journalist showed any interest in Hervé Picard. Not one. Nobody visited the set to interview this young director shooting his first movie. Which confirms, I think, that the media only have eyes for established filmmakers. The joke was very successful, and I probably could have pushed it further. But when the film was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, we started to tell the truth.

Q. It’s difficult to ask any detailed questions about Roman de Gare with spoiling one of its many surprises. But I think it’s safe to say that Dominique Pinon – who’s probably best known to U.S. audiences for playing odd-looking fellows Delicatessen and Amélie -- isn’t your traditionally handsome leading-man type. Is that why you cast him as a character who could be a schoolteacher, or a serial killer, or a ghostwriter? Or all of the above?

A. Exactly. Part of what the movie is about is how often we accept appearances as true.  Appearance is valued too much in our society. People don’t bother scratching beneath the surface. When you first see Dominique in Roman de Gare, you immediately think he’s the serial killer. But after a while, you think he may not be.  And then, you maybe change your mind again.

Q.  That’s true: Each time you evaluate that character, what you assume is based at least in part on the actor’s appearance. But he isn’t the only one in the movie who may be deceiving other characters --- and deceiving the audience. You really can’t  assume anyone is telling the truth at any point in Roman de Gare.

A. We live in a world based on lies. It’s like poker. Poker is a wonderful game because you can win a lot even with bad cards. Really, we all try to over-sell ourselves. When they try to seduce women, men show the best sides of themselves. This can be said about love –  but also about the business world. We have built a world that revolves around lies. And we know this. And that is why, if someone manages to seem sincere, he is immediately successful.  That is what I tried to show in Roman de Gare, where the characters exist only within lies. 

Q. Arthur Penn recently said that, although he remains proud of Bonnie and Clyde, he also views it as a mixed blessing, because it has overshadowed every other film he’s ever directed. Can you relate to that? Is there any sort of downside to being so strongly identified with – and by – A Man and a Woman after all these years?

A. I suppose there could be. But A Man and a Woman made so many things possible for me – enabled me to have a career – that I will always be grateful for it. And you know, the funny thing is, every other movie I’ve ever made, you could say is a kind of love story, another story of a man and a woman.

Q. Actually, now that you mention it, I guess you could have titled your new movie A Man a Woman instead of Roman de Gare.

A. [Laughs] I could have called all of my movies A Man and a Woman.