Friday Night

Friday Night (2002) is dreamy, high-class erotica for women, directed by a woman, the brilliant Claire Denis.  The film is hushed, images fluidly pouring through one another in complex dissolves.  The movie is shot in immense close-ups, almost microscopically detailed, intercut with wet cityscapes that seem to melt into eyes and groping hands.  The effect is elegant and slightly hallucinatory -- we have the sense that the encounter shown in the film may be some sort of erotic dream.  This effect is engendered in part by the movie's radical dissolution of space into a series of highly charged close-ups that don't define a coherent topography -- rather, the viewer's eye is anchored by small details, a wet window, a space heater turned up to glow orange, a dropped glove, a neon sign showing enormous spectacles.  In one sequence, the heroine looks at a condom vending machine and, somehow, the film eroticizes this humble device -- the instructions on the machine (for instance, "push all the way in") seem to whisper double entendre in the protagonist's ear.

Friday Night's plot is negligible.  Laure is a woman in her mid-thirties -- she is packing her belongings and plans to move in with her lover (we never see him), Francoise, in the morning.  The sun goes down and Laure gets in her car to drive to a dinner party.  It's very cold outside and there is a menacing man wandering around the sidewalk where her car is parked.  Laure finds herself trapped in an interminable traffic jam.  She turns on the radio and hears a female voice, a newscaster, suggesting that people provide rides to pedestrians because a public-transit strike has paralyzed the city -- the film refers to a real strike that occurred in 1995 and Denis cuts from the tangle of cars improbably jammed together in the rain to an entirely empty Metro platform.  Laure, who earlier recoiled in horror from a lone man walking near her car, now inexplicably picks up a handsome fellow, Jean, who is strolling through the columns of stalled vehicles.  Laure gets out of her vehicle to cancel her appearance at the dinner party and, for the first of two times in the movie, loses her car.  It seems to have magically moved -- this sort of sudden irrational physical displacement defines the film's aesthetized eroticism.  She finds the car and Jean takes charge, assuming the role of driver, and accelerating the vehicle in reverse for several dozen blocks -- again a magical act that can't be construed in any literal way, but that symbolically breaks them free of the paralyzing traffic jam.  This alarms Laure who makes Jean surrender the car back to her.  Jean walks away in the rain but Laure misses him -- once again, fortuity or erotic magic allows her to find him in a scarlet café where he is drinking coffee and flirting with a girl playing pinball.  (The scene, including a glimpse of the girl's erect nipple, is directly out of soft-core pornography -- the red décor and the slatterny exhausted waitress and the old pinball machine with its bright yellow button, a "tender button" to quote Gertrude Stein, makes no sense in any kind of sociological reality and is purely fantasy.)  Laure and Jean go to a hotel that is completely empty with all doors to all rooms wide open.  They make love and, then, go out to eat in a sleazy pizza place, also all velvety red, where Laure fantasizes about Jean seducing another woman, a disheveled angry blonde seated near them, in the toilet.  They return to the hotel, make love some more until Jean does something that might mark Laure's body -- she repels him and, in the morning, runs through the grey, pre-dawn streets, once again looking for her lost car.   This is pure sex, sex without narrative, sex without consequences...

The film is effective as an erotic reverie -- when Jean smokes a cigarette, the camera lovingly records the smoke curling out of the cracked window of Laure's car.  The stalled vehicles in the traffic jam are jammed together implausibly close and their hoods steam -- everything is languid, erotic, wet and cold exteriors giving way to warm and dark interior rooms that all seem to lead into one another.   The picture doesn't judge the protagonist -- in the last freeze-frame shot, we see her running (as Denis says in the commentary, "for her life"), with a little crooked smile on her face.  This is a rare film that is worth studying because it is not about anything other than desire and sex.