Friday Night

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Bringing together two of the things for which the French are best known - disgruntled workers and facile sexuality -- Claire Denis' Friday Night (Vendredi Soir) presents a man and a woman, strangers stranded by a transit strike who come to pass the time with something meant to pass for passion.

It is a woman's story of liberation and last hurrahs without malice or aforethought - a story of recklessness without consequence and sex without mess -- Isadora Wing's fantasy made film. Laure (Valérie Lemercier) is packing up her books, cleaning out her closets, and giving up the key to the room of her own. The camera captures her every move (it is not in real time, but it may feel as if it's double that). She bathes as if to make a new start, packs what little she's keeping of her private self into her car (also for sale), and sets off into the evening air to her boyfriend's place - soon their place. Her ambivalence is palpable.

Laure does not turn back - does not seem to regret beyond wistfulness - but neither does she move forward. There is no movement. For a moment - an eternity - her car is caught in stillness. Frozen between what was and what will be in a traffic jam of metaphors that traps the audience along with the characters on the screen. Both by intended identification and inevitable alienation. She drifts in and out of sleep -- creating a context for the dreamlike denouement - and in her most alert and lucid moments, rummages through the remnants of her life that she has boxed up to trash, salvaging bits and pieces.

A voice on the radio illogically encourages people in cars to pick up strangers to help keep things moving - and Laure's eye lights on one or two (one she rejects, one rejects her in an echo of the social dance). Then, following the eyes of other women through the mist, she spies her hero, Jean (Vincent Lindon), good-looking in that most unpersuasive French way, and invites him in. The conversation is sparse, the night noises at turns melodic and cacophonous, the adventure unreal - a quick turn away from the standstill, and the roads are open and clear, he takes the wheel, and the rest, as they say, is literature. Or should be.

But it is not compelling. So allusive, it is as if about nothing. Laure is a dull and uninteresting creature - making it hard to care what she wants or feels. And Jean is deadeningly unsexy, despite the swagger and the sometimes leer. A cipher meant to satisfy, he leaves us unmoved.

Denis is a skilled and gifted filmmaker, and her film is rich in subtleties and subtexts - ironies and antitheses. The camera infuses the scenery with fantastical specks of light that seem intended to give a magical air to the would-be implacable Paris night. But an essence is lost. The essence is lost.

A one-night stand should never seem so bland. Zipless, indeed.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene