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…

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…

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…

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…

The other day I was reading a book about Modernism. The book mentions a group of artists that saw the car as one of humanity's greatest inventions because it gave us access to a powerful new sensory experience - speed. Of course, we had a concept of speed and could experience the thrill of it before cars, but not to anywhere near the same extent. I don't think I've ever seen a film that better captures the sensual thrill of speed than this one.

Yes, of course, there are plenty of great car films that capture a similar sensation, but I found FRIDAY NIGHT to be unique and more affecting for three reasons. First, the film delays our gratification. The…