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Red Lights
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| Year: |
2004
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Director: |
Cédric Kahn
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| Stars: |
Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Charline Paul, Jean-Pierre Gos, Sava Lolov, Micky Finn
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| Genre: |
Thriller |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 2 votes) |
| Review: |
Antoine Dunan (Jean-Piere Darroussin) is waiting for his wife Hélène (Carole Bouquet) in a bar, but she keeps ringing him to tell him she will be late. As he sits and orders another beer, making that three in total, he catches sight of her across the street saying goodbye to a man, making Antoine contemplate the possibility that she is being unfatihful to him. She doesn't appear to be acting guiltily and is more concerned with the trip they are about to take today, to pick up their two children from summer camp in the south. But with Antoine's secret imbibing, anything could go wrong...
This enigmatic thriller was adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon by director Cédric Kahn and his two co-writers, but to call it a thriller is perhaps to misrepresent it as it was more a suspenseful character piece, if anything. For the whole of the film star Darroussin takes centre stage as we journey through Antoine's long dark night of the soul and then see him face up to the aftermath of his actions, but there are points in which you wonder how much you are watching is accurate and how much is the product of his booze-addled mind.
Antoine is an alcoholic and not a sympathetic chap as he takes every opportunity to grab a drink, avoiding telling his wife that he is coping with his suspicions about (and jealousy of) her by numbing them away with his addiction. This would be bad enough if he were carrying out his irresponsibilities at home, but when he is taking to the road for a long drive from Paris, then it's not only himself he is endangering. All the way through his driving - he refuses to allow Hélène to take the wheel - you're waiting for him to mess up, for the big disaster to occur.
But it doesn't really happen in the manner you might expect, as his erratic behaviour winds up his wife so much that when he is off for yet another surreptitious double whisky in a bar he has stopped near she opts to disappear from the car, leaving him a note telling him she has taken the train instead. This makes Antoine mad, and he chases after her, a pursuit which leads him a merry dance through the French countryside; as night falls, Kahn makes the atmosphere oppressive, assisted in no small part by the police roadblocks and radio news reports about an escaped fugitive.
So when Antoine picks up a hitcher (Vincent Deniard), it doesn't take a genius to work out that he might have landed himself in more trouble, yet the film is reluctant to spell everything out, and when events turn nightmarish they have an unsettling quality of making us unsure of the possible outcome, especially when we notice that the fugitive may well be the dark side of the protagonist's frustrations. Antoine may make it to the next day, but he has little memory of the past night due to his inebriation and we wonder where his wife could possibly be. In truth, this is all wrapped up far too neatly, and the happy ending after all we have seen is not one hundred percent convincing, but does have us pondering on how Antoine's irresponsible actions have paradoxically done him good, which is a lot more uncomfortable than it sounds considering the cost to his wife.
Aka: Feux Rouges.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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