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Friday Night
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In Cars
In Claire Denis’ Friday Night, a woman gets stuck in a
Parisian traffic jam. (This is not the sole narrative
content of the film, but it’s what I’ll concentrate on here.) The cars crawl,
as we observe the idle pastimes of commuters – smoking, singing, dozing. It is
a more whimsical version of the comedy of chaotic, industrial society that
Jacques Tati etched so superbly in his Trafic (1971) – or the dystopian nightmare conjured in Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic Weekend (1967).
But something else is happening
on Denis’ melancholic, nocturnal, end-of-week crawl. A gentle voice on the
radio urges drivers to be kind to one of the many people who are on foot in the
streets. The heroine, Laure (Valérie Lemercier), is at first reluctant and
fearful of strangers. But she eventually opens her private sphere to a man,
Jean (Vincent Lindon), whom she has never met. The entire drama of the film
unfolds from this single, simple but monumental act of reaching out to an
unknown Other.
It is a curious coincidence that
two great filmmakers – Denis for her long opening movement, and Kiarostami for his entire movie in Ten (2002) – should, at
the same moment, alight on the car as a central subject. It is another curious
coincidence that they happen to be the only filmmakers whom the contemporary
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has written on at length. Nancy is a
commentator whose work obsessively addresses the themes of encountering “the
stranger”, and of the difficulties of forming a workable community in a
fragmented world – themes that resonate deeply for countries that grapple with
what the media love to call a “refugee crisis”.
Both Ten and Friday Night mark
a revolution in the cinema’s depiction of automobiles, a turn towards the
philosophical essay rather than adrenalin-pumped melodrama. In action movies
and thrillers, cars are usually either the best means of escaping from normal
society (as in The Fast and the Furious and its sequels);
or they symbolise, in paranoiac terms, the fragile social unit that is
constantly under violating attack from vicious, monstrous Others (recall Steven
Spielberg’s career-launching Duel [1971]).
In a far-reaching essay called
“Fate and the Family Sedan”, the Australian critic Meaghan Morris showed that
Australian movies have long been particularly attune to the possibilities of
cars in cinema. On the one hand, George Miller’s Mad Max movies use gleefully extravagant, customised vehicles as a means of conjuring a
kind of Australian Western of goodies and baddies out in the landscape, beyond
the law.
On the other hand, daggier
Australian films like Michael Thornhill’s The
FJ Holden (1977) or Jane
Campion’s ingenious short Peel (1982) offer the inside of a car as a social microcosm – but
not in an enclosed, paranoiac way. As Morris argues, the car is, in cultural
terms, a curious kind of uncertain border space: it seals the passengers in
their rigidly circumscribed, social roles; but it also cannot help but let in
the multifarious influences of the outside world and its changing history.
Kiarostami’s digital cameras
mounted on the dashboard in Ten not
only capture of the intimacy of life in cars, but also suggest the cold eye of
the surveillance camera – in other words, the convergence of private and public
spheres. Friday Night, too, addresses
the transformation of the most intimate experience into a collective drama –
but in a trusting, optimistic, open-minded way, so different from the regular
smash-and-burn screen fantasies that fetishise the motor car.
MORE Denis: Trouble Every Day, White Material, Beau travail, Chocolat, High Life © Adrian Martin July 2003 |
