2002 ‘Vendredi soir’ Directed by Claire Denis
Paris, 1995. Laure is about to meet friends for dinner. But on her way out, she discovers that the entire city is stalled by a massive transit strike. When a handsome stranger offers her a ride, Laure takes a highly charged, impossibly erotic detour.
i can’t remember being more touched or enthralled during a recent moviegoing experience, even just watching cars at standstill. sitting so close to the screen, witnessing gestures of romance so upclose — i’ve never been so fully embraced by tenderness on screen 😩
35mm. BAM.
Let us all take a moment to appreciate a film that shows people purchasing condoms before their random sexual encounter.
Thank you.
There's a story here, a brief interlude of romantic eroticism, but it's secondary to the glimpses we have of a remarkably lovely night in Paris. Stopped in traffic, Laure is surrounded by faces friendly and (mostly) unfriendly, and Denis lingers on each of them to give us just enough details to fill in stories of our own creation, little prompts to stir our imaginations. "Oh, of course the trucker has a dog..." we think to ourselves. "Surely, it must be lonely driving those long miles." And from there we move on to the next passenger (it's unfair to…
The first half of this, up to when Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon enter the hotel, is easily among my favorite things Denis has ever done. The whole build-to-night pre-title card sequence is extremely bold and gorgeous, Lemercier vibing out by herself in her car is a pleasant mood. It’s fun to be out at night, and people watch, and see what’s happening, and Denis totally gets it—everyone here is just rolling with it. The colors are extremely pleasant to look at, and she somehow manages to make traffic look sexy.
I used to think all the extreme close-ups of body parts were about abstraction and defamiliarization, and that’s part of what’s happening, but the primary agenda is actually conveying…
Sex with strangers done Denis-style.
Fits snuggly within the one-night stand genre. With Denis behind the wheel, this thing becomes sensorial to the max, observational to a tee, and filled with all sorts of evocative details that accompany the erotic fantasy.
For as immersive as her visuals are, I just didn't feel immersed this time around. While she remains adept to cinema's narcotized, erotic potential, with Agnes Godard's ethereal compositions doing the heavy lifting, there just isn't enough insight or emotion here to hold onto.
Too flimsy for my taste.
Laure: "I didn't hear where you wanted to go?"
Jean: "Leave me where you want."
Like Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon", but without the darkness, Claire Denis's "Friday Night" (French: "Vendredi Soir") is a beautifully filmed French romance that speaks many truths about the elliptical nature of love. The film follows a young 30's or so French woman, Laure, (Valérie Lemercier) that is stuck in her car at night in citywide traffic jams caused by a public transportation strike. She feels lonely, tired, and has already packed to move on to a new life. Her friends having husbands and babies to take care of doesn't help out her depressed state of mind. Feeling guilty having passed on helping a Parisian in…
An erotic film that nominally plays by convention—woman who rushes into a phase of life she finds she is not ready for comes across a dark, mysterious stranger who can change her life in a night—but so resolutely avoids the aesthetic and narrative arcs of such stories to actually be, y'know, erotic. Denis does not underplay the sense of apprehension, even fear, of someone who realizes how fast they are letting someone in (Shostakovich's 8th quartet is brilliantly revised from political paranoia to romantic terror as this dawns on Lemercier), and even when digging into the seismic effect a stranger can have on a person, she attunes to the quiet, fleeting observations over a bombastic plot. Some may fault it for not being "romantic" as we tend to understand it in film, but VENDREDI SOIR is romantic as it is in the world, with connections that are not overemphasized even as their aftereffects can be great.
the apprehensions of forthcoming commitments, the struggle of seeing "[his] place" as "our place", the worry that somehow this will be your last night of autonomy, the knowledge that any brief disruption in social order stops time for its duration (and when time is stopped you can go anywhere until the clocks start ticking again), and the feeling that maybe these fleeting, transient encounters in unexpected places can be far more fulfilling and life-changing than the sharing of a lifetime with someone.
(also i wonder if denis took any inspiration from schneemann's "fuses" in the way the sex scenes are shot? both abstract the sexual act totally to display the closeness and sharing at its heart)
Dans les mains de n'importe quel réalisateur, ça n'aurait été qu'un exercice de style probablement sans substance (filmer un embouteillage pendant 40 minutes, puis une scène de sexe de 30 minutes). Mais pas avec Claire Denis.
Je sais pas comment elle fait son découpage, mais c'est absolument débile. La scène de sexe par exemple, il faut voir à quel point elle accorde de l'attention tant aux oreilles, au cou, aux pieds, à la peau, aux yeux, aux genoux, etc. On ne sait plus quelle main est à qui, dans quel chandail ou pantalon elle va. C'est sûrement la plus belle scène de sexe entre inconnus que j'ai vue. Normalement, les films se concentrent sur l'acte et sur les visages des…
Heaven knows there's little more cathartic than an empty apartment with all its little idiosyncrasies packed away into tiny marked boxes all ready to relocate, but even at life's purest peaks the foreboding ambience of Denis is slowly writhing under the floorboards, planning things, scribbling ugly unintelligible notes into its diary, holding its breath. Equal parts serene and apprehensive the city acts as a maze, a game of cat and mouse, as if invisible overlords were endlessly observing the movements of the humans lost within, wondering just why they choose to go down the roads that they do. The eiffel tower works as a searchlight, looking out over the city, searching for anomalies that hide in plain sight. Like a…
I have read a few reviews on this and it seems many loved it, so this isn't an objective outlier for Claire Denis. Not at all. She has yet again touched and hypnotised many with this one --- but not me.
I still have a fair portion of her filmography to go but I'm sure this will be the most bored I am when watching a Claire Denis movie and it's because I didn't feel it quite like her other movies. When it began, I was mildly immersed but then somehow it got more distant as it went on and the connection between me and the film had almost entirely worn away by the end. I enjoyed the quiet stares…
Anxiety, apprehension, sensuality, all Denis calling cards executed in such a small, beguiling window of time. Desire and fear in a wonderful dance that pays off with pizza, sex, and one of the most hopeful and rewarding final smiles I've seen in a film. But that's not all -- the thrill of not packing moving boxes for five minutes, the thrill of the night, the thrill of the unknown -- all rendered in an impossibly beautiful register. Reality? Dream? Dunno. Don't care. Could be both. Feels too grand to exist within a dreamscape. Whatever happens and whatever it is, carry this memory with you wherever you go.
Intimacy expressionistically examined by Denis. Honestly this wasn’t at all what I was expecting from this film but the second half is probably one of the best depictions of pure, raw pleasure you’re likely to see. There’s no overly sentimental cinematic style to the lovemaking. Everything feels completely real but still manages to lack that uneasy feeling of voyeurism that similar films can be guilty of. The context of the intimate scenes revolve around a woman stuck (literally) between two major places in her life, and the traffic jam that frames the whole film gives her time to contemplate the decisions she’s making, which leads her to what could be viewed as one last act of true expression, totally real…
Denis is at her best when focused and meditative. It's so apparent in Friday Night. There's nothing excessive here. Only the trance of Godard's parisian traffic jam. Storytelling becomes accessibly personal in this format.
Essential viewing, thankful for this one.
Denis provides a masterclass with her use of texture and incorporating the senses
This was really nice! It looked super pretty and a score that interacted with the different moods fo the film really well. This definitely fir into Claire Denis' style of filmmaking but to me it felt a bit uneventful. Nothing really carried too much weight to be very impactful, but I still enjoyed it
Alot of pretty scenes and what I'm pretty sure was an adulterous romance. In other words, this was a movie made by French people. 6/10
Parisian romance, dreamy and visually seductive, poetic in nature, employing close-up camera shots to illicit lust and desire, thus creating a warm and seductive fleeting moment between two central characters who, despite the intimacy, exchange minimal dialogue amidst the alloy and blaring horns of a Parisian traffic jam.
I am smiling, I feel good about having seen t and beholding this wonderful simplicity of cinema, I am truly overjoyed and I want to break in tears because of that ending ahhsgh...
May God always bless you, Claire Denis.
That was beautiful. The level of intimacy and yearning that those extreme close-ups exuded, giving it a warmth that moderates the erotism; along with the reckless and unapologetic decisions, and sense of liberation. oh my god.
the music in this made me so emotional that i genuinely feel a little bit sick, proper gut-punch stuff. i just was not prepared to like this anywhere near as much as i did. kind of quietly sad if that makes any sense? (yes i am crying)
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