Feux rouges (2004) Reviews

• Two thirds of a good thriller

  Larry-1152004-09-14

  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.

  More

• The Red & The Black

  Ali_John_Catterall2004-09-07

  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.

  More

• One for the road!

  jotix1002004-09-18

  This film, in my humble opinion, has been misunderstood by the public, judging by the comments I've heard about it. First of all, the director Cedric Kahn is one of France's most interesting figures to come out in the last years. He knows what he is doing, and what's more, he's being naughty in the way he presents his story that makes us see it one way, but is it what we are seeing real? The adaptation by M. Kahn and Laurence Ferreira Barbosa takes the Georges Simenon story from America to France. The most interesting thing about Antoine is that he is an ordinary man. He is married to a Helene, who is a more successful person; Helene is a lawyer who must make a lot of money, much more than Antoine. As a couple, we can't see them together at all. Antoine is a man who is not handsome. Helene, on the other hand is a beautiful woman, and we wonder what brought them together in the first place? We witness Antoine going to the bathroom where he ogles his own wife in the shower. It appears their sexual life has ended long before we meet them. Antoine has a drinking problem. On the trip to pick up their children they encounter heavy traffic. As they take a detour from the main highway, their troubles start. We see the passing "red lights" of the different bars beckoning Antoine to stop and have another beer, or a beer with a chaser. To make things worse, they hear on the radio about the escapee from the Le Mans prison, near to where they are traveling. We see the roadblocks and the erratic way in which Antoine begins to drive. After one pit stop, Helene disappears. She has decided to take the train and leaves him a note. Antoine goes to the station, but he is late. Thus begins what will be a long night adventure along rural, nocturnal France. Without giving away what happens, we watch Antoine waking up. Antoine's car is in a ditch and he must fix the tire if he wants to go to get the children. This awakening seems to me, the turning point of the story. Are we sure what we saw after Helene's disappearance and what happened in the road to Antoine with a stranger really occur? Mr. Kahn is playing with us. There are a lot of clues, but as detectives, the director is asking us to stay attentive to what is really going on, or isn't. The film belongs to Jean Pierre Darroussin. He is an actor whose own appearance makes us not care for the man we see on the screen. On the other hand, M. Darrousin knows who this Antoine is and what makes him tick. His performance is subtle, yet he carries the film in a way no one would expect from a not well known star. Carole Bouquet is a bourgeois woman who seems to be living in the wrong marriage. In contrast with her husband, she is in control of her life; she appears, at least on the surface, not to care about Antoine, but she has stayed married for a while. We know that Helene cares for Antoine at the end of the film when the two meet at the hospital. This film shows Cedric Kahn as a director to be reckoned with.

  More

• If you love diving into a character via roadhouse blues in France, you'll really like this movie, if not love it

  Quinoa19842004-10-06

  The first thing to take note in Red Lights is that the story is not rushed: Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darrousin) is perhaps a passive-aggressive, or maybe just having a mid-life crisis. He and his wife Helene are planning for a trip to pick up the kids from summer camp. But the drive hits some things in the way- he has a beer and a whiskey before leaving; a traffic jam gets to Antoine; he drinks again at a roadside; he and his wife bicker; he drinks again; she leaves, and once he realizes he can't catch up with her, he decides to have a night with a little more drinking ahead. While he says he doesn't drink too often ("two, three times a year", he says), this night is different. Especially with a fugitive somewhere out on the loose, as the radio says. Cedric Kahn is a skilled and trust-worthy director (via France) for a few reasons in dealing with his latest film Red Lights. He doesn't make the pace in the tenser scenes (with a couple of juicy exceptions) really quick cut like in a choppy Hollywood piece. He brings an interesting blend of visuals with the city and the roads, the cars, then as it grows darker outside, the lights outside become key. When Antoine awakes the next morning on the roadside, he's out in the country. As well, he has a great blend of music from Debusy, whom I may have heard before this film but never recognized. It's a fascinating element to add with the impending doom of the film's story. But the key thing that the director can do for a film is the right casting, and here's it's impeccable in dealing with the three leads. Jean-Pierre Darrousin is terrific at conveying the mind-set of this husband in a rocky relationship. Then in the second and third acts, despite what he's doing on the road, he keeps consistent in keeping as the film's reluctant hero. Credit should also be given to first-time actor Vincent Deniard, who is perfect at being the "quiet one you got to watch". And Carole Bouquet is a fair counterpart to a Darrosin. Although the denouement starts to drag, for my money the film's main chunk doesn't. It would be one thing if Antoine just got drunk. But there's also a good interest in the talking points with the character, as he decides to blow his mind in the process. Red Lights is definitely an art-house film that won't please everyone (the film ends rather realistically, without the kind of extra bit American audiences might want that's more intimate here), but it's still very compelling.

  More

• "The devil is on vacation with you"

  Mikeonalpha992005-09-07

  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.

  More