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Friday Night review
:. Director: Claire Denis
:. Starring: Valérie Lemercier, Vincent Lindon
:. Running Time: 1:30
:. Year: 2003
:. Country: France
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A far cry from the postcard imagery foreigners might have of Paris, Claire Denis' Friday Night plunges us into a stand-still moment of the gritty everyday life of Parisians. Caught in a huge traffic-jam caused by a transportation strike, Laure (Valérie Lemercier) takes a stranger to carpool (Jean—Vincent Lindon), a rather simple gesture whose outcome will be a one-night stand in a hotel.
Based on Vendredi Soir, a novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim, with a premise more topical than ever—"hard-working" unions are as usual paralyzing France at this very moment—Denis (Trouble Every Day—review coming soon, Beau Travail, Chocolat) has built a film about details where plot isn't as important as the meticulous depiction of banal real-life events.
In a long opening sequence her camera embraces Paris at night, from the rooftops to the dark facades of buildings before diving into traffic. Accompanied by a haunting score from long-time musical alter-ego Dickon Hinchliffe (Tindersticks) she films Paris with a breathtaking but sad beauty which is reminiscent of Werner Herzog's opening of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Paris is an urban jungle—Jacques Tati tackled that subject with humor in Playtime—and we see the pale faces of Parisians, prisoners of their cars, in a sea of vehicles drenched by the rain while radio is used as an ironical commentary, playing a song about traveling far away, "Manureva", when the host is not making fun of the inextricable situation.
When Jean gets in the car, we immediately witness the proximity of the bodies and the soul, which anticipates the logicical conclusion of the night. They communicate through their bodies, rather than through words and we follow them to a bar, a restaurant and a hotel. Wherever they are, Denis studies the environment, the mechanical gestures of people at work or the interaction of other customers. Friday Night might work as a negative of Jacques Dutronc's anthem "Paris S'éveille" (Paris awakes). While his song was describing, with a similar attention to detail, the ealry morning hours of Paris with a hint of optimism, the film uses the same approach to portrait the last hours of the capital, on a pessimistic note (traffic jam, rain, cold). The filmmaker gives us a realistic feel of life in Paris and the meeting of two strangers, each of them being unglamorized—one will notice as she films Laure & Jean's bodies in an un-eroticized manner. Denis finds beauty in the most simple things of life and transmits it to us.
Lemercier & Lindon carry the film on their shoulders, underplaying it, and Lemercier's performance is especially striking as she takes on a role worlds apart from her personality and typical roles—she's probably one of the funniest Frenchwomen who started her career as a witty stand-up comic.
Friday Night tends to stretch toward the end, but the basic narrative is intertwined with interludes born from the characters' fantasies, a metaphor for what this night—this film—is for them, an anonymous fantasy they can live out for a few hours while their regular life is suspended in traffic.
Fred Thom
 French Movies: Reviews 2012 - present
French Films: 1998 - 2011 Reviews
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