Post by Capo on Jul 7, 2008 17:34:20 GMT
Vendredi soir
Friday Night
Claire Denis 2002 | France
As the weekend creeps over Paris, a woman about to move in with her fiancé encounters a stranger in a traffic jam, and offers him a lift to wherever…
An immensely intimate film, frank and honest in its account of a one night stand. On the one hand it is warming and liberating, both as a refreshingly open narrative (the opening twenty minutes unfold over a congested traffic jam, before it turns into a race for love, before it turns into a fleshy fling) and in depicting a morally clouded sexual encounter; on the other hand, it is suffocating and claustrophobic, in both aesthetic (many close-ups lingering on boredom in the traffic jam, lingering on flesh to the point of making sex an abstract equation) and the situation in which it places its two protagonists - a slow-moving car, a near-empty restaurant, a silent hotel room. Life isn't easy, and self-reflexively, nor is the film, as it swings from one emotion to another which contradicts it, and as a whole it remains infinitely and tellingly ambiguous. It'd be half the film it is without the clever implication of an unseen fiancé, with whom our female lover is seemingly moving in with after Friday night, of which we can make what we wish.
Friday Night
Claire Denis 2002 | France
As the weekend creeps over Paris, a woman about to move in with her fiancé encounters a stranger in a traffic jam, and offers him a lift to wherever…
An immensely intimate film, frank and honest in its account of a one night stand. On the one hand it is warming and liberating, both as a refreshingly open narrative (the opening twenty minutes unfold over a congested traffic jam, before it turns into a race for love, before it turns into a fleshy fling) and in depicting a morally clouded sexual encounter; on the other hand, it is suffocating and claustrophobic, in both aesthetic (many close-ups lingering on boredom in the traffic jam, lingering on flesh to the point of making sex an abstract equation) and the situation in which it places its two protagonists - a slow-moving car, a near-empty restaurant, a silent hotel room. Life isn't easy, and self-reflexively, nor is the film, as it swings from one emotion to another which contradicts it, and as a whole it remains infinitely and tellingly ambiguous. It'd be half the film it is without the clever implication of an unseen fiancé, with whom our female lover is seemingly moving in with after Friday night, of which we can make what we wish.