Claire Denis has made a lot of interesting movies. Friday Night is less political, allusive, and elliptical than most of her other films. The story consists of a one-night love affair that occurs just when a woman is about to move in with her boyfriend, and the film approaches that story relatively straightforwardly. But the mood is captivating, the visual techniques convey the nuances of phenomenological movements exceedingly well, and the “small” story is used to capture a very interesting underlying thematic structure.
So, first off, the visual strategy throughout was marvelous, creating an amazing sense of texture and involvement by filling the frame with faces, hands, and small physical details, shooting a traffic jam from slightly low angles, letting an over-the-shoulder shot be dominated by the back of a character’s head, and so on. In particular, I loved the contrast between the extremely dense images (cluttered blue rooftops with red chimneys foreshadowing a traffic jam of bluish cars with red brake lights) before the beginning of the love affair, and the swayingly romantic cinematography after it begins. The early images create such a strong sense of worldly boundedness, and there is a sudden liberation after the man enters the woman’s car. Instantly the focus shifts from shots of the traffic jam, and of people’s faces through their car windshields, to shots of the woman’s legs as she stretches, the man’s hands as he scratches his collarbone. This change in emphasis mirrors the main character’s shifting sense of herself: the shots from the outside, through her foggy windshield, evoke her sense of being trapped within the situation, trapped by the contingencies of her social role and her environment; as soon as the man enters, her focus is on the Other, both on his bodily presence and on her self-awareness of her own body within his presence—the external situation dissolves into the background of this new scene. After this initial shift we get a second shift, as suddenly the camera looks out from within the car, rather than endlessly looking inwards: now the perspective is that of the man and woman together; they are looking out from their (at least temporarily) united perspective on the broader situation; the perspective on this external situation is no longer that of entrapment, but that of an uninvolved gaze newly interested in the “outside.” This visual evolution continues throughout the movie, but I’ll stop my description of it here.
The second thing I loved about the film was how the visual (and audio) strategy tied into the the general structure of the film. A woman is in the midst of moving, and for a brief moment this places her outside the realm of her everyday self and its obligations. It’s like Heart of Darkness or Lawrence of Arabia writ small. In her love affair, she takes this momentary lack of fixity as an opportunity to discover the Other in his uniqueness. Of course, love in general wrenches one away from broad everyday social and personal structures into the bewildering and overpowering presence of the Other—and the story of the film encapsulates this movement, though, again, it is writ small. The way that the cinematography evokes and mirrors this movement, and its conclusion with the lead character re-engaging in the world with renewed perspective, is entrancing.
Also, the importance of the visual mood should not be undervalued. The film creates a wonderfully gauzy, ethereal mood with simple car exhaust fumes and reflections on windshields, and that gentle, hazy mood allows us to drift into the story, feel its rhythms, its capture of shifting subjective, and intersubjective, experience.
Tags: Denis, intersubjectivity, movies, phenomenology, visual techniques
