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.
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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…
Claire Denis “can I make this subject horny?” challenge
☑️ 1988: colonialism
☑️ 1990: cockfighting
☑️ 1994: urban sprawl
☑️ 2001: pharmaceutical reps
✅ 2002: traffic jams
Friday Night captures the gentle embraces and timid erotic tension between two strangers with such fervent intimacy. it, through Denis’ deeply sensual and tactile filmmaking, nails the beauty of desire whilst subverting the traditional notions of love. no other filmmaker does it quite like Denis and this film is one of her absolute greatest imo.
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)
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.
Between this and Morvern Callar, I think I have my new obsessions for 2022.
Upon rewatch, I can’t help but think that the majority of this wasn’t even real. The whole thing plays out like a hazy wet dream, and it’s probably the closest to magical realism that Claire Denis has gotten so far (even moreso than Trouble Every Day or High Life). We know next to nothing about the lead character (played by Valérie Lemercier) other than that it’s quite clear that she’s feeling uncertain about a major transitional period in her life, and while she’s literally stuck in transition, she bumps into Vincent Lindon’s character and they have a night of bliss that may or may not causes…
A cinema of fragments. Of moments. Of love.
After such I walk down the street, I see only les rondelles, feet, hands, shadow. Life as cinema.
Amongst this twilight montage there's a need to inject 40s romance tropes to signify fairytale. The absurd in the random brief encounter. Vincent as real is all wrong, too cool, a throwback to screen past, but somehow Quettier's coupage transcends faciality. Still glad the lead was not Binoche. There's an inaccessibility and vagueness for which I find myself so grateful.
16mm and 35mm. From a time when cinema was still cinema.
The care and score. Anyone who has made love in a Parisian 2-star knows this feeling. There is such tenderness not just in…
What I like most about Friday Night is the sensual understanding of a car as your own personal space to play music, sing off key, gawk at others for your own internal dialogue. To invite someone into your car innately adds a specific type of intimacy. Add the mechanics of stopping and starting, paying attention to your surroundings, and the delicate wafts of steam from the engine on colder nights. Claire Denis' film takes places during a transit strike that has the streets of Paris in a gridlock and the radio DJs telling folks they could help by just offering a ride to a stranger. Two strangers are in a car and this is the setup for a night of…
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.
This manages to feel radical despite it surely being Claire Denis’ gentlest and most relaxed film. It tells the delicate story of Laure (Valérie Lemercier) who at the start of the film is packing up her apartment in preparation for moving in with her boyfriend. He is physically absent from the film leaving a commitment sized uncertainty in Laure’s mind. Does she really want to do this thing that she is doing? Does she really want to give up the romance and adventure of a life without commitment?
From the start, Friday Night, shimmers with music and images of a sleepy Paris. There’s a dreamlike quality to the atmosphere which relaxes the story into a type of reverie. Upon leaving…
