Roman de Gare is French for what we call an “airport novel,” but it’s virtually the opposite. In a good airport novel, the plot plows you through safety-belt demonstrations, $5 “snacks” and lists of connecting flights. In Roman de Gare, the plot has a way of braking to a halt and forcing us to question everything that has gone before. What can we believe, and when can we believe it? Directed by Claude Lelouch, that inexhaustible middlebrow whose A Man and a Woman (1966) monopolized art house screens for months and months, it’s so clever that finally that’s all it is: clever.



It begins with a flash-forward to the end (or, as it turns out, not quite the end), featuring a famous novelist being questioned by the cops for murder. This is Judith Ralitzer, played by the elegant Fanny Ardant, Francois Truffaut’s widow. She’s idolized by the next character we meet, who is Huguette (Audrey Dana). We join her and her boyfriend, Paul (Cyrille Eldin), in a car on an expressway at 3 a.m. They’re having a fight that seems to be about her smoking but is actually about their entire relationship, which ends when Paul abandons her at a highway cafe, taking with him her purse, money, keys, everything. What a lousy trick.



Watching this happen is a man (Dominique Pinon) drinking coffee in the cafe. He offers her a ride and keeps sipping his coffee until she agrees. The movie hints this is actually Jacques Maury, a pedophile who has escaped from prison. Nicknamed “the Magician,” he performs magic tricks to entrance his victims. On the other hand, he may be Judith Ralitzer’s ghost writer, as he claims. And what about a worried wife we meet talking to a cop? She thinks her husband, a schoolteacher, has abandoned her. Lelouch constructs a story in which this same man could be one, but not, I THINK, all of the above.



Dominique Pinon is a fascinating actor to watch. With a stepped-on face, a scrawny beard and a low-key, insinuating manner, he is not blessed by the gods, but he seems able to fascinate women. As he and Huguette drive through the night, he drops the bombshell that he’s the ghost writer of her favorite novelist. Then he says things that may synch with news reports of the Magician. All the time, he chews gum in lots of fast little chomps. I was going to say he looks like he’s chewing his cud, but he’s not like a cow; he’s like an insect.



At this point, the movie had me rather fascinated. Turns out Huguette and Paul were driving to the country so she could introduce her parents to Paul for the first time. “Would you do me a huge favor?” she asks her new friend. She wants him to impersonate her fiancé. This leads us into a sly domestic comedy, when Huguette’s mother wonders who this little man really is, and Huguette’s daughter (who lives on the farm) takes him trout-fishing; they’re gone for hours, while Huguette reflects she knows nothing about the man except that he said he was a ghost writer and then he said he wasn’t. And now the REAL Paul turns up at the farmhouse.



It’s here that the movie goes wrong, starting with Huguette’s method of facing this situation. Then we learn more about the novelist, her ghost writer, the wife with the missing husband, the cop she’s talking to, one of his relatives and magic tricks. I’ve invested countless words denouncing plots as retreads! Standard! Obligatory! Here’s a plot that double-crosses itself at every opportunity. I should be delighted with it, especially since it visits two of my favorite places, Cannes and Beaune, home of a medieval hospital that made a deep impression on me. Lined up along the walls of an enormous arching room, the patients are bedded in alcoves with a clear view of the altar where Mass is celebrated; the Beaune cure is prayer.

Offshore from Cannes in her luxurious yacht, Judith floats with whomever the hell Dominique Pinon is playing now. He has unexpected plans for her next novel, leading to the question that generates the flash-forward at the beginning. The closing scenes of the movie are dominated by Fanny Ardant, who has the kind of sculptured beauty Truffaut must have recognized when he desired to make her his wife and his star.



When a movie like Roman de Gare works, it’s ingenious, deceptive and slippery. When it doesn’t, it’s just jerking our chains. I think I understand the alternative realities of the plot, and I concede the loose ends are tied up, sort of, but I didn’t care. One of the characters played by Pinon would have been enough for this movie. I would have been interested in the escaped serial killer or the ghost writer. But not in both of them interchangeably, and that pesky missing husband. Come on, I’m thinking, give us a place to stand. Do we care about Huguette because her favorite novelist is a fraud, or because her daughter may be sleeping with the fishes?

Roman de Gare

Two and 1/2 stars



Stars: Dominique Pinon, Fanny Ardant and Audrey Dana

Director: Claude Lelouch

Rated: R for brief language and sexual references

Space Chimps no chump

Films entertains with whiz-bang action and witty dialogue



Space Chimps is delightful from beginning to end: a goofy space opera that sends three U.S. chimptronauts rocketing to a galaxy, as they say, far, far away.  Although it’s aimed at a younger market and isn’t in the same science fiction league as Wall-E, it’s successful at what it wants to do: take us to an alien planet and present us with a large assortment of bug-eyed monsters, not to mention a little charmer nicknamed Kilowatt who lights up when she gets excited, or afraid, or just about anything else. 



The story starts with the circus career of the chimp Ham III (voice by Andy Samberg), the grandson of the first chimp launched by NASA into space (and, yes, that first chimp really was named Ham).  Ham III works at being shot out of a cannon and never quite landing where he should.  Once, when he goes really high, he considers the beauty of the moon and outer space, and has a Right Stuff moment, of which there are several.  He feels keenly that he hasn’t lived up to the family tradition. 



Meanwhile, the U.S. space program faces a crisis.  One of its deep space probes has disappeared into a wormhole.  It is perhaps a measure of the sophistication of younger audiences that no attempt is made to explain what a wormhole is.  Perhaps that’s because wormholes are only conjecture anyway, and if you can’t say there is one, how can you say what it is? 



What with one thing and another, Ham III finds himself enlisted in the crew of a space flight to follow the probe into the wormhole and see what happened to it.  Joining the mission is a big chimp named Titan (Patrick Warburton), and the cute (in chimp terms) Luna (Cheryl Hines).  Hurtling through what looks like a dime-store version of the sound-and-light fantasy in 2001, they land on a planet where the local creatures are ruled by a big, ugly tyrant named Zartog (Jeff Daniels). 



He has commandeered the original NASA probe and uses its extendable arms to punish his enemies by dipping them into a super cold bath so they freeze in an instant.  This is a cruel fate, especially since the eyeballs of his victims continue to roll, which means they must be alive inside their frozen shells, which implies peculiarities about their metabolism. 



The chimps, of course, have lots of adventures, including being chased through a cave by a monster of many teeth, and being rescued by the plucky Kilowatt, who eventually sees more of the monster than she really desires.  Then there’s a showdown with Zartog, some business about the planet’s three suns (night lasts only five minutes), and a most ingenious way to blast off again. 



On Earth, there’s an unnecessary subplot about an evil senator (Stanley Tucci) who wants to disband the space program and replace it with something you really have to hear to believe.  On second thought, maybe the subplot is necessary, just so we get to hear his idea. 

I ponder strange things during movies like this.  For example, there seem to be only five forms of life on the planet.  Zartog is one, his obedient subjects are another, some flying creatures are a third, the toothy monster is the fourth, and Kilowatt is the fifth.  I suppose a planet where evolution has produced only five species is possible.  But what do they eat?  The planet looks like Monument Valley, is covered with sand, and has no flora or fauna.  Could they all be silicon-based?  And since Zartog, the tooth monster and Kilowatt each seem to be one of a kind, who do they mate with?  Or do silicon beings need to mate?  And have they invented the hourglass? 

Space Chimps

Three Stars

Stars: Andy Samberg, Cheryl Hines and Patrick Warburton

Director: Kirk De Micco

Rated: G