Travellin' Light

by Adrian Danks for Senses of Cinema

Claire Denis' greatest films are derived from an accumulation of details, a combination of such elements as precise, often cut-off framing, a tableaux of gestures and poses, surprising but galvanising musical choices on the soundtrack, and a series of explicitly sensual, concrete but ephemerally physical encounters between the human body and its eminently tactile surroundings. Very much in this mould, Vendredi soir is, in essence, a series of sketches, life studies or fleeting impressions placed side-by-side to build a tangible, experiential world. Its story of a one-night stand in a Paris crippled by a public transport strike might seem clichéd, fantastical or even insubstantial, but Denis' meticulous style (which builds from fragments, glances, gestures, things caressed by the frame) and her emphasis on and preoccupation with experience (the moment, the here-and-now) create an extraordinarily intimate, sensual and felt filmic universe. Although Vendredi soir places both intensely physical and ultimately unknowable characters at the centre of its drama – its tone is so delicate and subtle, at times comic or menacing, that I am loathe to pin it down – it is the fate and actions of their bodies (as bodies) that is Denis' chief concern. In this difficult preoccupation she is aided by the dexterous but never obtrusive camera of Agnès Godard that gets extraordinarily close to the orbiting bodies of the two central characters without diminishing their inherent unknowability (and it is great to see such a roving, intimate camera deployed within Denis carefully structured compositions on 35mm film). Helping create a film that Amy Taubin evocatively (and accurately) describes as “[a]t once shy and bold, discreet and abandoned.” (2) Read More...