Friday Night (2002)

You may scoff at the idea of a Claire Denis' film about a one night stand. Friday Night is that film, and it is a bloody good one. Mind you, this is not chatty psychology or teary-eyed romance - this is not Before the sunset. Denis works with a minimal plot and a restless camera that will never even for a second lull us into the mechanics of conventional sex fantasies. Laure is about to move to her lover. She intends to have dinner at a friend's house, but because of a strike, the traffic jam is endless. Paris is at a stanstill. Authorities encourage drivers to pick up hitch hikers. The first half of the film is dominated by this traffic situation. The roars of engines, bokeh light effects, arguments and fights, Laure's fiddling with the radio. In the second part of the film, Laure has offered a man, Jean, a ride, and already from very early on, there is a tension there. There is some confusion but they end up in a hotel. You can guess the rest. But this is far from a pornographic account of a sexual encounter. Denis' opts for the enigmatic, blurry, fragmentary. It is a film where details stand out: a leg, a fork, a weird fantasy scene, a dreamy light. Denis masterfully builds up the film so that it is never uninteresting or unintelligible. This is remarkable because we know next to nothing about the two characters - and they barely speak - and there is barely any music in the film (and no explicit scenes)! -- Agnès Godard, cinematographer, turns this film into something utterly unique; every angle, panning movement and frame bears a heavy set of signification. -- This is a film to be watched several times. American reviewers were dissapointed in the uncharismatic actors who never managed to 'set the screen ablaze'. I wonder what kind of movie they expected to watch.
To the credit of this film, one can say that it plays very little by the rules of binary gender roles and stereotypes. Friday night opts for something else, it makes bodies look new, unexplored. This is precisely what all film should do, but very rarely does. Dickon Hinchcliffe's (Tindersticks) sparse score works magic.
So far, every movie I have seen by Claire Denis has blown me away. She knows how to make movies that are very independent in relation to the written story. She works with images.