Main Cast: Valérie Lemercier, Vincent Lindon, Hélène de Saint Père, Hélène Fillières, Florence Loiret
Release Year: 2002
Country: FR
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
Paris resident Laure (Valerie Lemercier) has just finished packing her belongings in preparation for moving in with her lover, though she is oblivious to her apparent jitters at doing so. As she leaves her apartment for the night to join a pair of friends for dinner, Laure gets held up in traffic, due to a crippling public transportation strike. As she waits in her car, she finds a sense of serenity in the midst of all the chaos and begins to watch a number of people as they work their way through the congestion. One man in particular attracts her attention, as he also seems to be calmly regarding the traffic jam and its participants. The man, Jean (Vincent Lindon), gets into Laure's car and transports her down a number of side streets and away from all the confusion -- as both the strangers begin to feel an attraction toward one another. Director Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir was selected to compete in a number of film festivals in 2002, including the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie Guide
Review
Claire Denis' languid, surreal romance may be one of the director's more minor efforts, but like the best of her work, it reverberates with the kind of sensuality and emotional truth few filmmakers can match. The plot of Vendredi Soir is the stuff of routine French erotica: a woman, about to move in with her significant other, gets stuck in a Paris traffic jam and takes up with a mysterious pedestrian for the evening. But Denis is no Claude Lelouch. She doesn't insinuate that her two star-crossed lovers are brought together by fate or metaphysics, in fact, rarely does she suggest they have anything in common other than the physical. That said, Vendredi Soir is downright devoted to the physical: the space between two people in a car, at a restaurant table, in bed. Denis avoids conventionally titillating sex scenes, choosing instead to shoot her lovers clothed (for the most part), focusing on hands, positions, and the details of foreplay. The argument can be made that there isn't enough material in Vendredi Soir to fill out an entire feature, but when a filmmaker takes such time and care in chronicling the vicissitudes of day-to-day personal interaction, it's hard to complain. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
