Opens Fri Aug 8
at the Varsity.
On November 24, 1995, CNN's Paris correspondent Peter Humi filed this report: "Angered by Prime Minister Alain Juppe's plans to reform the social security system, [around 250,000] French public-sector workers went on strike Friday, paralyzing air and rail travel across the country.... The 24-hour stoppage compelled thousands of commuters to walk, bicycle, or brave rush-hour traffic jams.... In Paris, all 14 subway lines were shut down and 90 percent of buses remained in their depots."
One of the real consequences of the public-sector strike of 1995 (the traffic jam) is transformed into the fictional backdrop of what is without a doubt Claire Denis' fourth masterpiece, Vendredi Soir (Friday Night). (Her previous masterpieces are Chocolat [1988], J'ai Pas Sommeil [1994], and her best film yet, Beau Travail [1999]--please note, the Chocolat I'm referring to does not star Johnny Depp.)
The cityscape of Paris opens Vendredi Soir. From its ancient rooftops, which are submerged in the dying light of the setting sun, we descend and enter a small, autumn-colored apartment. A woman (Valérie Lemercier) in the later years of her 30s is busy packing her belongings; she is moving to another section of the city to share a place with her boyfriend. After she has completed packing her things, she drives to a girlfriend's apartment for a dinner engagement. After dinner, she will move in with her boyfriend. That is the plan. The plan, however, is disrupted by the mother of all traffic jams, which brings her journey into the night to a near standstill. But in the movie version--which is not set in 1995 (though, as with the real strike, it occurs on a Friday)--the traffic jam, which in real life must have been pure hell, is portrayed by Denis as something almost pleasant. Never has a traffic jam, with its turtle-slow movement, its heated and cluttered automobiles and exhaustion of fumes, seemed so sexy, even fleshy.
Suddenly, a complete stranger, a man in the earlier years of his 40s (Vincent Lindon), enters the domain of the woman's traffic-imprisoned automobile. He is not dangerous, or seductive; he is very ordinary looking, which is fine because the woman is also very ordinary looking. They are ordinary strangers. After smoking cigarettes and saying a few words, he assumes control of her car and manages to extricate it from the wicked spell of the traffic jam. In a matter of hours, they are in a warm hotel room, in bed, naked, having anonymous sex. When the end of their night arrives, the strangers' passion pleasantly dissolves into the twilight of the dawn.
When I met Claire Denis one Friday afternoon in early June to talk about Vendredi Soir, we instead talked about the large bruise on her forehead. She had fallen from her mountain bike while riding to (or from) work in Paris, she explained to me. For several days, the upper part of her face was swollen and monstrous. "You should have seen my head while I was in Brazil last week," she said with her perfectly French accent. "It was like a grapefruit. Big and ugly." By the stress in her tone, I could tell that she didn't like being disfigured, which was strange considering how violent and bloody her previous movie, Trouble Every Day (2001), was. That film had two brutal mutilation scenes whose detail and length alienated most of her fans and appalled almost every critic in America. Vendredi Soir, much to the relief of her fans and critics, is the very opposite of Trouble Every Day. There is no blood, dark desires, deep wounds or bruises, just two healthy strangers and the intact landscape of their flesh.
Vendredi Soir can be described as a journey to the land of the two strangers' flesh. By means of the camera, which is manned by Denis' frequent collaborator/cinematographer Agnès Godard, we journey to this mythical land. Denis' script (which she co-wrote with Emmanuèle Bernheim, the author of the novel that Vendredi Soir is based on), along with her direction, guides us to this fantastic territory that comes alive in the heart of the hotel room. Once there, once we have arrived, the camera freely roams the discovered geography: the ankles, torsos, foreheads, hips, the forest of his chest, the slopes of her breasts, the shores of their shoulder blades.
In Trouble Every Day, Denis and Godard traveled to another country, in another room (a master bedroom). Denis led the camera beyond paradise, beyond the limits of the flesh into the depths of the body--the gore of blood and organs. Interestingly enough, the music that accompanied us to hell in Trouble Every Day is the same music that accompanies us to paradise in Vendredi Soir. It is by the London-based band Tindersticks, whose piano and violin player, Dickon Hinchcliffe, scored the movie. The match between the Tindersticks and Denis, like that between her and Godard, could not be improved upon; both are masters of creating what one music critic described as "atmospheres of elegant decadence."
While having dinner with Clair Denis at Le Pichet that Friday evening following our interview (the Seattle Art Museum and WigglyWorld were previewing her film), I asked her about the almost complete lack of dialogue in her film, and the fanatical emphasis on the images, the surface of things, and the movements and expressions of the actors. What purposes did this serve? Could this be the end of modern cinema, and the rebirth of the silent era of pure images? Alas, dear reader, Denis offered me a wonderful answer, which I cannot recall because I neglected to record it on paper or electronically--nor did the glasses of red wine help me retain her vital words in my head. Like Vendredi Soir, all that I have are the images of that evening: the remains of the grapefruit-head, the French food, the sun setting on Seattle, and the arrival of Friday night.
