Vendredi soir

Directed by Claire Denis

Programme Notes

Unsettled about her decision to move in with her boyfriend, Laure gets caught in gridlock and opens her car door to a man who will change her life.

Peter Bradshaw
Friday August 22, 2003
The Guardian [Read The Full Review Here]

After the silliness that was Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis has returned to form with this outstanding film: a swooningly erotic, beguilingly romantic adventure. It is a rapturous transcription of an evening in one woman's life, paced out almost in real time and mostly wordless.

Laure, played by Valérie Lemercier, is marooned in a traffic jam and impulsively picks up a stranger, Jean (Vincent Lindon). This is the prelude to an encounter which over just a few hours miraculously assumes the lineaments of a glorious affair in miniature.

Denis focuses on surfaces, textures, details; these are minutely observed and transformed, given life. Laure and Jean's meeting has a piercingly intense, yet gentle quality which was absent from, say, Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy.

One of the most subversive things about it is Denis's refusal to pay the debt to pleasure with a finger-wagging moral: that bogus idea that the lovers must be scared and sobered by some assumed dark side to their experience.

Date movies rarely come sexier or smarter than this.

Reviewed by Tom Dawson, BBCi Films
[Read The Full Review Here]

In adapting Emmanuèle Bernheim's first-person novel, writer-director Claire Denis (Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day) doesn't probe into her characters' jobs, or their personal relationships - the quietly assured Jean deliberately remaining a blank slate.
Instead, through an impressionistic marriage of visuals and sound, Denis evokes the feelings of being propelled by desire.
She privileges Laure's perspective, by showing us her fantasies of Jean making out with a glamorous young woman (Hélène Fillières) in a restaurant bathroom, or of taking him to meet her friends. Indeed, the whole film can perhaps be read as Laure's fantasy, from the moment Jean is seemingly conjured up out of thin air and appears by her side.

Verbal dialogue in this impressively acted drama is almost non-existent: meaning is conveyed by the close-ups of looks and glances exchanged between the lovers, or by the way that Agnes Godard's mobile camera tracks their bodies moving in mutual attraction within a cramped hotel room.
For those used to the likes of Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy and Catherine Breillat's Romance, Vendredi Soir may seem surprisingly discreet. Yet its warmth and tenderness help make for a deeply romantic experience.

Cast
Valérie Lemercier Laure
Vincent Lindon Jean
Hélène de Saint-Père Marie

France 2002
Running time: I hour 29 minutes
In French with English subtitles

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