Also this issue: Fresh Breath The stunning-looking Respiro is a breeze. -Cindy Fuchs Déjà Vu Terminator 3 shows us the same old future, with a few twists. -Cindy Fuchs Screen Picks -Sam Adams New Shorts Continuing Shorts Repertory Film Showtimes

July 3- 9, 2003

movies

Danger After Dark

Strangers in the night: Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon embrace.

Strangers meet in Claire Denis’ minor-key Friday Night.

by Sam Adams

The first few minutes of any movie are always critical, but it seems especially so with Claire Denis’ languorous, lyrical Friday Night, since they lay a foundation to which we never return. Laure (Valérie Lemercier) is packing up her apartment, preparing to move in with her boyfriend the next day. (In typically understated Denis fashion, that information is delivered via a key he’s left with a tag reading, "Our place. Tomorrow.") Like anyone packing up her life, she’s sorting as she goes, asking herself whether each object belongs to her past or future. Slipping a red satin dress under her plain white skirt, she observes herself in the mirror, and asks, "Shall I keep it?" But what’s she’s really asking is, "Is this still who I am?" She keeps the dress.

Her packing done, Laure descends and slides into her car full of thrift-store donations, heading off to dine with friends before the movers come the next morning. But a public transportation strike has clogged the Friday-night streets, and as Laure sits in her practically motionless car, her mind begins to wander, and so does Agnès Godard's magnificent camera, which at one point drifts across a sea of stopped cars, taking in each driver's face, before finally finding Laure. (Shades of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" video, without the transcendent ending.) As Laure sings along to a booming pop song, the lettering on the car in front of her begins to dance, and the neon signs of roadside shops seem to drift, unmoored, through the air. Images run together, overlapping and dissolving; though each driver is closed off in his or her own world, the film seems to want to bring them together, to get them to recognize their common experience. The radio urges drivers to pick up hitchhikers on this cold winter night, and Laure tries to comply, offering a lift to a comely young man (Denis regular Grégoire Colin). But he declines, sensibly -- "It's faster on foot" -- and she goes back to sorting through her stuff, picking through a box of books in her back seat, discovering attachments she thought she'd severed. "I'll keep this one," she declares, and puts another aside as well.

It's then that Jean (Vincent Lindon) knocks on her window, asking for a ride. Shabby, scruffy and none-too-revealing, he's tough to judge, an unknown; when Laure asks where she can take him, he says, "Anywhere." He's the unknown, and for Laure, he might represent a last grab at whatever wayward life she's about to leave behind.

This "one last fling" aspect is Friday Night's most prosaic feature; it's enough of a disruption from the movie's generally open-ended tone that you wish Denis had found a way around it, though she might have been tied into the structure by Emmanuèle Bernheim's source novel. It seems to cheapen the complexity of both performances to allow the impression that Laure and Jean might be about to play out some Red Shoe Diaries fantasy.

Fortunately, Denis has chosen actors who forsake vanity and feel no need to play their characters as anything other than ordinary. An actor's insistence on ordinariness can open the floodgates to a deluge of mannered coughing and stuttering, but Lemercier merely lets her hair go a bit wild and keeps her eyes lowered, as if she's not quite sure she wants to exist. Lindon exudes more natural sexuality, but he seems rootless, as if his libido were the only thing anchoring him to the ground. It's hard to imagine him going home after the movie's over; he might disappear with first light.

Denis has become the poet laureate of perverse sexuality: When the wife in the movie XX/XY gives her husband that Claire Denis box set he's been wanting for his birthday, it's a sign that he's about to indulge in an ill-advised affair that will nearly wreck their marriage. Friday Night's passions are less extreme than the cannibalistic urges of Trouble Every Day or the sadistic repressed homosexuality of Beau Travail (to name just Denis' most recent features), and it's hard to escape the feeling that Friday Night is a minor movie by comparison. (In retrospect, it's even more of a shame that Beau Travail got only a single screening in Philadelphia, and that at the Art Museum.) Denis seems to be taking a break from the political concerns that usually animate her, and it seems to deprive her of the opportunity to say as much as she usually does. When Laure and Jean finally break free of the traffic jam, they speed dizzily away and arrive in a part of town that's almost deserted, as if they'd arrived on another planet. We never quite come back to earth.

recommended

Friday Night

Directed by Claire Denis A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse