Dir. Cedric Kahn, 2004, France, 105mins
Cast:
Carole Bouquet, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Vincent Deniard
On the hottest day of the year Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and Helene (Carole Bouquet) embark on a sweaty, irritable journey to pick up their children from a boarding school in Southern France. Successful and glamorous lawyer Helene has already kept her more dishevelled husband waiting for a couple of hours in a Parisian bar. Irked at being made to wait, Antoine sucks down a few beers, builds up a belligerent mood but still stubbornly gets behind the wheel.
Tense, sinister and morally complex, Cedric Kahn's gripping relationship thriller is steeped in portentous images of impending catastrophe. Like Kahn's previous film, Roberto Succo, Red Lights is a warped and violent road trip with a grimly comic and surreal edge. Even as the journey begins, ominous signs litter the screen: A Car lays smashed on the roadside; The radio announces that 200 people died on the roads the same time last year; Traffic seems to be vindictive, with sudden halts and blaring horns. Most alarmingly and significantly, we are warned of an escaped violent convict from a nearby penitentiary.
Trapped in the car with Antoine and Helene, we breathe the dead, arid air of a failing middle-class marriage. Like the long tracking shot in Goddard's Weekend when cars are seen as microcosms of the lives of the people inside, Khan uses the vehicle as an intensifier for the couples frustrations and dysfunction. Their utterly believable sparse dialogue and loaded silences are at once horribly familiar and painful to watch. Kahn skilfully tweaks the nerves of masculine paranoia. Helene is the beautiful, successful one in the marriage, which clearly annoys Antoine. As Helene sits silent, angry but controlled, Antoine is nastily hostile, snapping at her and becoming irrational. In the classic "male" model, Antoine refuses to accept that the road he has taken is the wrong turn. His repeated alcoholic pit stops finally push Helene into storming off, leaving a note in the car that she has taken the train. Suddenly realising the seriousness of the situation, Antoine searches for Helene, but to no avail. Plastered, he enters another bar and encounters a large, implacable man (Vincent Deniard). Despite his better judgment, he offers the man a lift to devastating consequences.
Red Lights plays like a Hitchock-esque amalgam of Laurent Cantet's Time Out, Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm and even Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. As we watch a man scramble to reclaim some of his ebbing masculinity, Antoine's proximity to danger makes him feel more alive. He says of his alcohol consumption that he "Wanted to feel strong". The slow burning plot is misleading -this is a skilfully and tightly crafted thriller. Surprisingly, the most tense and fraught moment comes when Antoine pieces together what has happened to his wife in a series of frantic phone calls. It become more and more likely with each call that something terrible has happened. In a neat narrative time-jump, it all comes to a head in a horrific, life-altering moment with potentially cataclysmic repercussions.
Patrick Blossier's hazy, dreamy camerawork creates both a nightmarish and beautiful world as colours and lights blur past Darroussin's inebriated eyeballs. Many of the night-time car scenes were shot in a studio to enhance a feeling of unreality that at times borders of David Lynch's Wild At Heart. Combined with the murky, shady tones of the music (Noctures by Debussy), Kahn's direction creates a vividly menacing world where danger hides in the shadows. It's not a place for the naïve. When Antoine visits a seedy bar, a man paws at him saying, "You're a nice guy. It's written on your fucking face. Everyone can see it, so be careful" - we know that Antoine is a man to be taken advantage of.
Jean-Pierre Darroussin is stunning as the dissatisfied middle-management everyman Antoine. Pathetic but compelling, he recalls Jack Nicholson's crumpled Oscar Schmidt and the desperate, frustrated Aurelien Recoing in Time Out. As you see the glint of adventure fire up in his eyes, he becomes more and more drunken and often funnier, but this is a man careering toward tragedy.
Ultimately, Red Lights asks some complicated moral questions. Are we witnessing the re-masculation of a modern wimp, or the begging of a total family disintegration? In some ways the themes of the film have a lot in common with Fight Club's disaffected male psyches. We are left to wonder by ourselves about this stewing broth of violence, pre-emptive revenge, dysfunction and sexual power-play. Red Lights leaves you with the queasy feeling that stripped bare, human nature is disturbing, complex and frighteningly unknowable.
Paul Mallaghan
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