Starring: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Charline Paul Script: Laurence Ferreira Barbosa Cédric Kahn Original Title: Feux Rouges Running Time: 1:46 Country: France Year: 2004 Official Site: Red Lights
A suspense film with strong doses of dark comedy, Cédric Kahn's new film shows how our lives and the consequences of our acts can get caught in a precise and intricate mechanism only controlled by fate.
Leaving Paris during a busy weekend to go pick up their kids, husband & wife Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin—Un Air de Famille, The Town is Quiet) & Hélène (Caroline Bouquet—That Obscure Object of Desire, Dead Tired) quickly get annoyed with each other. Stuck in traffic and after a few stops on the way, Antoine finds the opportunity to indulge in a couple of whiskeys, so Hélène decides to leave the car and continue by train. The next morning, as Antoine emerges from his night of drunkenness in a seedy bar and realizes Hélène hasn't reached her destination, he knows—and we know—that something bad happened, especially as a dangerous convict is on the loose.
From there, we follow Antoine's journey, from picking up a disturbing hitchhiker to finding his wife. Giving us enough to figure out what really happened, rather than building a standard thriller, Kahn is more interested in describing in details each action and its irremediable consequences, which are intertwined with a notion of divine justice.
For the filmmaker our lives are linked to fate and we have no control. While one notices that this is the second film in a couple of years that uses a Paris traffic jam as a catalyst—one remembers Claire Denis' finely crafted Friday Night where traffic led to a one-night stand rather than to violence—one can't help being disturbed at how the simple fact of being drunk can have terrible repercussions. This isn't a moral piece but rather a variation on the "what if" premise and it is clear that Kahn (L'ennui) has built his film as a fable experimenting with fate. If his story never pretends to be credible in a realistic way, one can however have some issues with the way justice will be served as the violent scene seems to come from nowhere without any sense of a logic or emotional build-up. Just like in Minority Report—or with wars without purpose—there is a notion of "preemptive" here but since the character isn't yet aware of what happened, his burst into violence seems somewhat gratuitous or an anachronist act of vengeance, rather than just an instinct of survival.
The film's humor centers around Daroussin's performance, whether he is a drunk, cruel or desperate, and American audience who haven't had the chance to see him in Le Poulpe, which hasn't been distributed in the U.S.—Wellspring and Palm if you read this you should get your hands on it—will discover his dark side here. While Bouquet's presence in the film is quite short, she might too beautiful here for her own good, as we have trouble understanding how such a creature would have ended up marrying such a loser.
In the end, everything goes back to normal, at least in appearance, and Kahn turns off Red Lights as an exercise, appropriately ending on an ambiguous rather than on a moral note. The purpose wasn't to judge a human's actions but to meticulously study a chain reaction.
Red Lights review
