Main Cast: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Charline Paul, Jean-Pierre Gros
Release Year: 2004
Country: FR
Run Time: 106 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
A couple's marital woes lead to a terrifying ordeal in director Cédric Kahn's Red Lights. Co-written by Gilles Marchand (Who Killed Bambi?) and Kahn's frequent writing partner Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Red Lights is based on a novel by Georges Simenon. In the film, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) seems to be looking forward to taking his wife, Hélène (Carole Bouquet), for a long drive. The plan is to leave Paris and pick up their children at camp that evening, then spend a couple of weeks in the country relaxing. But when Hélène keeps him waiting, Antoine begins to drink. After several beers and a scotch, the couple hit the road, and immediately run into traffic leaving the city. Antoine has been hearing stories of horrible accidents on the road all evening, but that doesn't stop him from driving like a madman. When Hélène complains about his erratic driving, things just get worse. When they're not bickering, they're glaring silently out at the dark road. Eventually, Antoine decides to pull over for another drink, and when Hélène threatens to take the car and continue on without him, he takes the keys with him into the bar. When he gets out, he finds that Hélène has gone, leaving a note on the car saying she's continuing on by train. Antoine races to the train station, but he's too late, so he wanders into a nearby bar. There, he buys a drink for a sullen young man (Vincent Deniard), who later approaches him in the parking lot, asking for a ride. The two soon come to a police roadblock, and Antoine begins to suspect that his traveling companion is the escaped fugitive for whom the cops are looking. Red Lights had its U.S. premiere at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Review
Cédric Kahn's Red Lights is a tricky and tremendously engrossing film. Kahn is clearly a gifted filmmaker, setting up a dark domestic comedy as Antoine, an unhappy, self-pitying husband (superbly played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin) descends into a spiral of self-destructive behavior. Endless reports of traffic fatalities and an escaped convict sputter out in the background, foreshadowing the nightmare to come. Then Kahn slowly, skillfully drags his audience into the abyss. Antoine's distended nocturnal encounter with a potential murderer is a tense tour de force, surpassed by a seemingly simple scene the next morning in which the haggard husband borrows a phone in a pub and, with increasing desperation, tries to figure out what happened the night before. Kahn stages everything with great confidence and wit, knowing just what to show, and what to leave to the imagination. While things play out pretty much as one might expect them to, and the big twist of the film hinges on a pretty substantial contrivance, there's an undeniable psychological resonance to the couple's long, hostile silences as Antoine's passive aggressiveness gathers life-threatening momentum. The filmmakers subtly reject his retrograde sexual politics. The setup -- a weakling puts himself in harm's way to prove his manhood to his capable wife and to himself -- may seem obvious on the surface, but the skill of the execution and the teasing ambiguities of Antoine's self-inflicted ordeal combine to make Red Lights memorable. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
