|
Friday Night
Vendredi Soir
review by
Nicholas Schager, 28 February 2003
If Claire Denis’ masterfully
gruesome vampire tale Trouble Every Day detailed the most
violent expressions of love, then Friday Night, the French
director’s latest examination of amorous desire, is a sumptuous
evocation of the liberating exhilaration of unexpected romance. The
story of a one-night stand between two strangers, it’s a film so
beautifully attuned to the rhythms of passion that it sweeps one up
in blissful reverie, and marks yet another triumph for one of
cinema’s most dynamic directorial voices.
Working once again with longtime
cinematographer Agnes Godard, Denis cradles the film’s lovers in a
velvety cloak of darkness punctuated by the glittering light cast
from Paris’ street lamps, apartment windows, and car headlights –
the city is a shadowy wonderland that provides endless possibilities
for both warmth and cold, cruelty and joy. Denis has always placed
primary emphasis on visual filmmaking over expository narrative
development, and, in Friday Night, she reaches a mesmerizing
apex of silent storytelling, allowing the camera’s movements and
Nelly Quettier’s editing to convey the characters’ innermost
thoughts and emotions. The opening shots of the Parisian landscape
show us the city moving from daylight to dusk to night, and an image
of the Eiffel Tower’s swirling searchlight seems to suggest a
plaintive call, an S.O.S. that the film’s protagonist subconsciously
wants to articulate.
Laure (French comedienne Valérie
Lemercier, in a superb performance of understated eloquence) is
moving out of her apartment and into her boyfriend’s place. Once her
former home has been vacated, she plans on having dinner with
friends, but her trip is delayed by a citywide public transport
strike that’s paralyzed traffic. Laure sits trapped in her car, as
isolated and confined in her compact vehicle as the throngs of
commuters she watches from behind her windshield. Like their lost
and miserable countenances suggest, Laure is alone, and she seeks
comfort in the warmth of her car’s heater, using it to dry her still
wet hair and envelop her in its soft, womb-like embrace. When a
passerby knocks on her window, she instinctively locks the door and
drives away, frightened by the attempted intrusion of an outsider
into her safe private sphere. She’s simultaneously desperate for and
wary of companionship, her eyes scanning the crowds of cars in a
feeble attempt at human connection, even as she shies away from
personal interaction.
The radio advises drivers to offer
rides to those people walking the streets and, with the shame of her
prior refusal weighing upon her, she opens her door to a confident,
striking gentleman named Jean (the smoldering Vincent Lindon). Upon
closing the door he remarks “It’s warm in here” and, shortly
thereafter, lights a cigarette, the wafts of smoke funneling out of
Jean’s nose and mouth and cascading over the clearly ecstatic
(reformed smoker) Laure – here, as throughout the film, heat and
Jean become synonymous with one another, two elemental forces
seeking to rejuvenate this delicate woman. A shot of Jean entering
the car, followed by Laure stretching her legs and then running her
hands through her hair silently reveals, in almost subliminal
fashion, the immediate attraction between the two, as Denis’ camera
sticks closely to its characters. The film, which contains virtually
no establishing, long, or two shots, crowds in on Laure and Jean in
extreme close-ups of their faces, their hands, and their craning
necks, striving to tell the story not as a disinterested outside
observer, but from the inside out.
Hopeful flights of the imagination
compel Laure to cancel her dinner plans, and the two engage in a
supple dance (or, one might say, game of hide and seek) around the
city streets: Laure, attempting to return to the car after making a
phone call, is unable to locate it or Jean; once she does, she’s
frightened by Jean’s aggressively fast driving (mirroring her own
fear of the accelerated pace of her feelings for him) and kicks him
out, only to find him later at a brasserie; the two wander onto the
streets, culminating in a revelatory kiss that leads to a sexual
tryst lasting into the wee hours of the morning. Denis, through
probing shots of casual physical movement – Jean’s hand on the back
of Laure’s neck, Laure sniffing her palm after she’s touched the
steering wheel Jean’s hands were on, their fingers gently grazing
one another while a girl pounds away on a pinball machine – gives
the escalating affair a voluptuous tactility. The film is
preoccupied with the sensory experience of the couple’s mysterious,
entrancing liaison.
Denis and co-screenwriter
Emmanuelle Bernheim (working from Bernheim’s novel of the same name)
sprinkle the film with small doses of devilish humor, such as a slow
panning shot of a condom machine that begins with the contraption’s
coin slot and ends with a button and the instruction: “Push all the
way in.” Given the director’s supreme command of the filmic medium,
however, it’s no surprise that her tale of adventurous amour – an
odyssey both frightening and thrilling – gracefully segues between
the serious, the impassioned, and the droll. Friday Night is
a magnificent example of film’s unmatched ability to express the
unspoken, and confirmation of Denis’ status as one of the medium’s
most exciting and virtuosa risk-takers.
|
|
