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Red Lights (Feux rouges)
For some reason, I thought I had reviewed this a while ago, but I guess that was one of the weeks when I ran out of time. It's been nearly two months since I saw it, but it keeps slipping back into my thoughts. It's no longer playing in New York City, but it may be making the arthouse rounds elsewhere, and I highly recommend it.
Red Lights is essentially a two-character drama in three acts. In the first, we get scenes from a marriage, the marriage being that of Antoine and Hélène, a couple played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin and former Bond girl Carole Bouquet (For Your Eyes Only). Trapped together in a car on a weekend road trip to pick up their children from camp, this is a couple who can barely suppress their conflicts -- and it doesn't help that Antoine has started drinking heavily even before they leave.
In the second act, Antoine and Hélène are separated, and we follow Antoine on a bizarre odyssey in which he alternately searches for Hélène and revels in the sudden freedom that he feels in her absence. As Antoine grows ever more reckless, you know that he's headed for trouble. To say more would be a spoiler.
In the third act, Antoine awakes from his drunken night and begins to search for Hélène in earnest. This leads to a tour-de-force sequence in which the director, Cédric Kahn, and his leading man create an astonishing mood of tension and urgency as Antoine does nothing more than stand at a bar and make phone call after phone call looking for his wife. Bad things have happened, some of which the audience knows, some of which they only suspect. The ending is, at best, bittersweet. (Again, to say more would be a spoiler.)
It's interesting to compare this film to another that it superficially (very superficially) resembles, Jonathan Mostow's Breakdown. The comparison says a lot about what differentiates Hollywood studio product from the arthouse circuit. In Breakdown, the characters are functional; they are filled in just enough to serve the machinations of the thriller plot, which is what the movie is about. In Red Lights, the thriller plot, such as it is, is not the end but merely the means to explore the characters and reveal their layers -- notably Antoine, who is very different by the end of the film. He's the same person, and Jean-Pierre Darroussin's exquisitely calibrated performance never lets you forget that. But now you know him a lot better, warts and all. You may even have come to like him. I did.
M.
"Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." -- Chinatown
"What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?" -- Roger Ebert
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