Feux rouges

Red Lights is like a bad dream you might have if you nodded off over the wheel during a long car journey, with the roar of the motorway and the crunch of tyres on gravel seeping into your subconscious. It's so ambient, it would work just as well as a radio play. En route to collecting their kids from summer camp, 'married alive' couple Antoine (Pierre-Darroussin) and Helene (Bouquet) bicker in the car, as Antoine accuses her of cramping his style. The only way this sad little man can assert himself is to pull over and slug whisky after whisky in every roadside bar. When his furious wife bails out to catch the train instead, it's the start of one of those Long Dark Nights of the Soul for both parties. 'I got sick of playing the good little doggie', Antoine tells his mysterious hitchhiker, in one of the movie's most memorable exchanges. 'You're like my doggie,' sneers his passenger. 'Always thirsty.' 'Where's your dog?' 'He's dead…' Based on the Georges Simenon novel, here's a dark little number, blackly comic, and as searing as the red neon lights that accompany each pit stop on the road to Hell.

A decent but ultimately disappointing thriller. It feels like slow-moving imitation Clouzot, with elements from Les Diaboliques ("What really happened?"), The Wages of Fear (high tension on a long drive), and Quai des Orfevres (a similar plot point I don't want to reveal here).

With tighter editing, "Feux rouges" could have been a much stronger movie. It does contain a number of memorable scenes, especially those involving the protagonist and his second passenger. Not a bad film at all, but it doesn't deserve the rave reviews it has drawn from several major critics.

7/10

The first few seconds of 'Feux Rouges' show Antoine - a mid-age Parisian insurance agent - writing a loving mail to his wife on the verge of a family vacation. The last few seconds of the movie show the couple exchanging loving smiles while driving to the South where they would pick the children from a camp to continue together the vacation. Everything goes wrong in the in-between.

'Feux Rouges' starts as a relationship drama and turns into a thriller and a wrong-turn movie. It is inspired by a novel of the Georges Simenon, and as many of Simenon's novels the characters are far from being great communicators. The lack of communication, the routine and maybe the differences in social positions make of Antoine an unhappy husband who is ready to spoil the start of the vacations by heavy drinking while on road. Much of the movie happens on the road, and the gradual tension building picking with the disappearance of the wife Helen strikes a cord of uneasiness and even claustrophobia - great achievement for a film filmed on highways and roads with the sky almost permanently on view. As in many of Simenon's novels there is a moralistic twist, and justice is made even if it is completely the result of hazard and not of the will of men. And there is a huge price to pay for this justice, which we only can guess as it happens out of the screen and story time.

Director Cedric Kahn has learned a few lessons in thrillers from the great masters, and fist of all from Hitchcock. Antoine is wonderfully played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin as the type of character that we know from the very first moment that he will get into trouble and he indeed does all to confirm this, but it is the character of Helene played by Carole Bouquet that he relates to all the time and who is his focal point of frustration, worry and love.The simplicity of the story telling, the careful gradation of tension towards horror, the low key ending which does not solve the conflict, but just postpones it beyond the duration of the screening make of this film a worth watching piece of cinema.

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.

"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+)