Feux rouges

"Red Lights", a subtitled French film, spends it's 1.75 hour run following Antoine (Darroussin) and his wife Hélène (Bouquet) as they leave Paris for a night drive to Bordeaux to pick up their kids. What should have been an ordinary road trip turns into an extraordinary series of events which will leave the couple forever changed. The less you know about these events prior to viewing the better as any hint of what happens could lead to a case of mistaken genre and spoilage. This film is a human drama which doesn't attempt to entertain with extremes but rather opts to engross with a slowly seductive tale of intrigues kept to realistic proportion. "Red Lights" relies heavily on the ability to identify with the adult married couple and the problems they encounter and, therefor, will play best with mature adult audiences. A nicely managed, methodical and very believable film which spends most of its time with Darroussin, "Red Lights" received good marks from critics and public alike and is well worth a look by mature viewers into French flicks. (B+)

Director Cedric Kahn's "Red Lights" alternates between bright day and scary night. Antoine Dunand (Jean-Pierre Darrousin) is an insurance company employee who may enjoy a decent salary but he feels outclassed, and is out-earned I'm sure, by his corporate attorney spouse, Helene (Carole Bouquet). They have a nice, urban apartment and two young kids, a boy and a girl, both at camp eagerly awaiting pickup by their parents.

Antoine feels neglected by Helene, actually hated, and he even half-suspects her time with fellow male employees goes beyond business. He consoles himself with beer and scotch, preferably one after the other. He's clearly becoming, if he isn't already, an alcoholic.

The two leave to pick up their children from a distant camp. It's holiday-making time in France and the highways are jammed. An impatient Antoine, infuriated by the crawl, takes two successive detours, one off the main highway, the other for several refuelings at on-the-way bars. His driving becomes increasingly erratic, his wife's complaints more provocative. Eventually she realizes he's not just driving poorly, he's getting progressively more smashed. An argument ensues interrupting the classical music on their radio. Her anger at his driving is a coda for their growing estrangement. And then a bulletin announces a dangerous criminal has broken prison and is on the loose.

Recognizing that Antoine is really loaded and he won't yield the car keys, Helene runs off while her husband is knocking down scotch, leaving a note that she'll take a train.

Antoine is excessively upset at finding Helene missing-though befogged by booze, he also probably recognizes his own weirdness. Setting off to intercept her train he accepts a morosely quiet hitchhiker (Vincent Deniard), a fellow who offers no name but guess who he really is (hint above).

The film now enters a dark and isolated countryside where Antoine, despite his towering blood alcohol level, becomes justifiably afraid of his mostly silent young passenger.

The ride becomes a trip to terror for Antoine who sobers up enough to know he better master a deteriorating and life-threatening situation. Having done that he hunts for his wife. To tell more would be to spoil an original, well-acted story about fairly ordinary people who have let their marriage grow stale for all the usually mundane reasons that presage a relationship crisis.

The three main characters make "Red Lights," a title that superficially is about Antoine's reckless disregard of traffic signals but actually spotlights the warnings we receive and often ignore about impending personal crises, work. Largely unknown outside of French cinema, all three well-experienced and effective lead actors keep the viewer glued to the screen.

Compared to the current star vehicle hit, "Collateral," "Red Lights" carries forward true, outstanding noir drama by focusing on the straying from safe paths of ordinary people in common situations.

9/10

Red Lights does not disappoint for artful cinematic tension, mining the rich resources of the French thriller -- no one can craft a thriller like the French. As the story unfolds, the viewer is driven increasingly into unease by the movie's primary conceit: the sudden unraveling of the milquetoast male lead before and then during a road trip into the country (in the throng of traffic during French vacation season) to pick up the couple's kids from camp. This ultimately has disastrous consequences for both husband and wife, despite their separating early in the story.

There are very effective touches here, unique to the French thriller. I especially liked Kahn's fearless willingness to run a protagonist straight into the ground so we can watch him grossly err and see him swerve into disaster, a risk most American directors wouldn't have the guts to take. He infuriates us and we are in total fear for him all at the same time. I also liked the way that Kahn can imbue simple sequences, like a series of phone calls, with utter tension.

What I did not like was the encroachment of pat, storytelling elements. The resolution is purely canned, and in particular there is one coincidence in the movie that is so Hollywood -- so Jerry Bruckheimer -- that it made me wince in embarrassment. It almost seems that, at the end, another director altogether stepped in to take the helm.

Red Lights is definitely worth seeing, but Kahn should have stayed the course with his somber, bold storytelling, rather than chickening out as he did. A good movie that could have easily been better.

Opens with brilliantly shot sequences and if it then moves into more traditional French bourgeoisie territory it does it with passion and intelligence. As the narrative unfolds, involving a car drive that begins tetchy and proceeds to become really scary, we identify with the main protagonists and are as concerned as the male lead when the other disappears. A lot of the first part of the film is shot through the front screen of the car but this is so well done with the accompanying dialogue, developing tragedy and suspense we are almost on the edge of our seats. We lurch into nightmare territory and things become almost unbearable as we struggle to assure ourselves as to what is really happening. I was not as interested as the director in the relationship between the high flying wife and the husband who sees himself as her poodle and presumably this is why I found the ending simplistic and verging on the insulting, but never mind a good ride up to then!

Red Lights is a strange, abstract, almost existential exercise in movie making. Adapted from the 1953 novel by Georges Simenon and set to Debussy's elegantly creepy Nuages, writer-director Cedric Kahn offers up movie with attributes of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller.

The feeling of foreboding begins immediately when we meet Antoine Dunant (Jean-Pierre Darroussin a low-level insurance executive. He's just leaving his job to meet his beautiful wife Hélène (Carole Bouquet) in a local café. They are planning to drive to the countryside from Paris to pick up their kids from summer camp.

But as soon as Antoine gets to the café he guzzles three beers back to back with one eye on the street lest his wife arrive before he's suitably fortified. It soon becomes pretty obvious that their marriage is far from happy - Antoine armed with enough drink to sink an elephant, settles into a manner of truculent impetuosity, while Helene remains detached, cold, and almost abusive.

While in the road, Helen discovers that her husband is utterly plastered. She hardly says anything as he weaves all over the road, but her silence speaks volumes. Thus starts a trip of barely controlled hostility with the husband clenching the wheel and brooding, while the wife fumes beside him. Both are so busy bickering with each other and thinking dark thoughts that they're half oblivious to news reports of an escaped convict on the loose nearby.

Antoine isn't usually a drinker, but something has snapped in him, and as the neon signs of the roadside bars start to beckon him, he becomes obsessed with downing as much cold beer and whisky as he can. He leaves Helene angrily waiting in the car while he goes into yet another bar, to prepare himself for the long night ahead.

Hélène, freaked by his increasing belligerence and inability to drive in a straight line, abandons her husband to look for a train station. Meanwhile Antoine strikes up a conversation with a reserved one-armed stranger (Vincent Deniard).

When, minutes later, the stranger steps out of the parking-lot shadows, his face half hidden by the hood of a sweatshirt, and asks for a ride, the cocky, staggering Antoine doesn't even break stride. By now he's so sweaty and drunk that he waves the fellow right into the car.

What follows is detour into a night of terror for Antoine, Helene, and for the viewer. The movie starts to resemble everyone's nightmare - the inexplicable disappearance of a loved one. And as Antoine embarks on a desperate journey to track his wife down, it soon becomes clear that Red Lights is really showing us a portrait of a marriage, a marriage that has been enigmatically hanging by a thread.

Their need to see the children again is probably just a way of distracting them from the aridness of their relationship. She's beautiful and accomplished, while he plain and dull. Somehow the couple began their marriage as equals, but she soon eclipsed him, for which he can't forgive her. Other than this, Kahn provides very little reason as to why their relationship has suddenly gone sour.

What Kahn does provide, however, is the knowledge that marriage can often dissipate completely, leave two strangers in a car, totally sick of each other, in desperate need of a reviving shock to the system. But when the sun finally rises, and Antoine is released from his drunken hell, Kahn does provide a dash of hope for the couple.

In the end, Red Lights is showing that relationships are frail and that the machinations of marriage are often inexplicable. And if nothing else, Antoine and Helen show that it can all dramatically and irrevocably change and fall apart in a searing flash of red light. Mike Leonard September 05.