Roman de gare (2007)
Directed by Claude Lelouch

Film Synopsis

Murder is a serious business, as popular crime writer Judith Ralitzer discovers as she struggles to pull together the fragmentary ideas for her next novel.  A killer on the run after escaping from prison - that's a good starting point.  It's a bit of a cliché, admittedly, so let's give the killer a quirky identity.  Let's call him: the Magician.  As well as raping and killing people, our central villain can also do conjuring tricks!   Now for the femme fatale.  Let's call her Huguette.  She's an independently minded girl who works as a hairdresser in Paris.  More clichés!  Let's try to make her more real by giving her a really dramatic intro.  She's dumped by the side of a busy road by her good-for-nothing fiancé.  She's in a terrible state - a bona fide orphan of the storm.  But then her saviour enters the story.  An ordinary looking Joe, he appears from nowhere,  like the mythical hero in a western, and offers the distressed girl his assistance.

Huguette sees at once that she has a friend, so she asks him to do her a small favour: will he agree to pass himself off as her future husband when she next visits her parents?  Intrigue and human interest - what more could the reader ask for?  To make things more interesting, we need a few extra subplots and secondary characters - just enough to pad things out to the required word count and keep the publisher happy.   Let's throw in a family who are in a state of total disarray after one of their number - we'll make him a professor - suddenly goes missing.  That makes three suspicious male characters - could they possibly be connected in some way?  Now that we have all the ingredients, all that's needed is to flesh out the characters, pull the story strands together, chuck in a few implausible plot twists and there we have it: Judith's next bestseller...