Crossed Tracks

Truth may be stranger than fiction but rare is a story without a dash of both. That’s at the centre of this marvellous French thriller from celebrated writer-director Claude Lelouch. As the film proceeds, stories unravel within a story. The protagonists of one become characters of the other. As the lives of a famous writer, her faceless ghost-writer, a serial rapist-killer, a desperate hooker-hairdresser, a teacher and his abandoned wife cross, it’s hard to tell who is who, or which is where.

Judith Ralitzer (Ardant) is a very well-known writer who is being questioned at the start of the film about her dead ghost-writer. Asked by the investigator to narrate her story from the beginning, she goes back to a night in Paris where a serial killer has just escaped from prison and car radios are flashing the news, along with warnings of a coming storm. This killer is called The Magician, for he draws in his victims with simple magic tricks.

Minutes later, we have a mysterious man at a gas station (Pinon) performing a magic trick for a young girl. Fidgety and obsequious, he instantly arouses suspicion, the doubts further taking wing from his assiduous wooing of a woman (Dana) who is dumped at the station by her angry fiancé after a fight. Later, he convinces the woman to let him give her a ride. At the end of it, he claims to be Ralitzer’s ghost-writer and narrates to the woman called Huguette a small passage to convince her, and then denies it. In this passage, Huguette is the protagonist, “an ordinary victim drawn to the killer like a moth”.

Lelouch wonderfully constructs an atmosphere of benign suspicion, down to their trip to Huguette’s parents in a modest farm in the hills. Huguette has convinced him to play her fiancé Paul for the sake of her expectant parents. However, her mother suspects something amiss, and Huguette is equally frantic when Paul goes missing with her teenage daughter for hours.

Ralitzer meanwhile has on her hands a ghostwriter insistent that he be given credit for his work, which has earned her a fortune. But as he works on a new novel to finish it and claim his due, Ralitzer is plotting an end entirely of her own.

This new novel is to be called ‘God, The Other’, and it is about a journey through France by a man who could be a serial killer, a famous writer’s ghost-writer, a bored teacher, a doctor or even God. The irony of god playing ghost-writer and writers playing god is pretty evident, as is the underlying theme about the ghosts we all have to bury. “Literature,” a character says, “is made of litters and erasures.”

Lelouch thrills in keeping us guessing, but unlike other directors, it’s not a brain test viewers have to clear. Everything is neatly tied up in the end. The writer-director’s achievement is not as much in disguising the man called Paul’s real identity or motives, as in convincing us that he could indeed be all he claims to be.

And Lelouch couldn’t have found a better actor for this than the former circus performer Pinon. While the women in the film are statuesque and imposing, it’s the scraggly, dimunitive, slightly distasteful Pinon you can’t take your eyes away from. Who better for such a film than a bumbling everybody who could be anybody?

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