Week #3 2020: Vendredi Soir
There’s a moment towards the end of the first series of Mad Men that could make it get up and kiss it on the lips. Everyone’s favourite sex weasel Pete Campbell needs to make good on his threats to Don Draper about revealing the latter’s true, secret backstory, which has been teased to viewers throughout the series. He storms into their superior, Bert Cooper’s office. After hearing the news that Draper has been living under an assumed identity, Bert Cooper – always seeming like a gnomic Colonel Sanders – walks around the table, stares bemusedly and says, ‘Mr Campbell… who cares?’ The series has made Draper’s identity one of the heavy constellations orbiting the action, and to see it come to ground not with a crash but with a feather’s glide is absolutely delicious. It’s not just seeing what Pete Campbell hopes to be a sabre transform into a rubber chicken in his hands, but it also felt like a rebuke to the televisual world around it. This was a TV landscape where Lost (and all it inspired) was looming large. Desperately eeking out minute peeks into a hoarded box of secrets, Lost had yet to reveal that it was a mise en abyme: like an endless game of pass the parcel with nothing to reveal. By contrast, Mad Men, trusting that it had a lot more to offer than reheating the same suspense for five seasons, spilled its beans and was none the worse for it.
I love this moment because plot has never seemed that important to me. I don’t anticipate what’s going to happen and it’s only on second viewing that I notice any logical gaps. I’m a cast iron stickler for leaps in emotional logic, but I’m never going to be the one to give it the ‘Why didn’t they just…?’ treatment. I really don’t care about spoilers. And every time I write about films, I have to look up the details of the plot if they go beyond anything less high concept than ‘man falls in love with a mannequin that is the reembodied spirit of an Egyptian diety’.
I’d probably say this is the defining difference between the arthouse and the multiplex. Swimming out into the wide world of cinema means you have to move from equating a good yarn with a good film. Zadie Smith put it well. She says that non-Hollywood cinema is instantly recognisable for ‘its slowness, although of course this ‘slowness’ is only the pace of real time… A parsing of the common phrase “I don’t like foreign movies” might be “I don’t want to sit in a cinema and feel the time pass.”’ But – and I recognise this isn't what gets most people to the pictures on Friday night –when you can feel time passing, it also lets you focus on character’s thoughts. Not what is happening, but what is happening to them. It’s not that a film with plenty of plot can’t be emotionally truthful, but the more plot, the greater likelihood of contrivance and the more you need to ask people who have previously thought were humans to react normally when events take a turn for the ex machina.
Case in point: Claire Denis’s 2002 film Vendredi Soir. As the film starts, we see Lore (Valerie Lemercier) packing up her belongings, preparing to move into her partner’s home. Before she can, she must spend a Friday night in the city. She heads out into the city to see her friends with a new baby, but isn’t keen to go. If it wasn’t already abundantly clear that this is the kind of scenario any other film would excise, Denis sets quite a considerable portion of the first half of the film in a traffic jam. We see the Eiffel Tower in a glamour shot at the beginning, but it serves only to remind us how far we are from the clear plot tracks that Hollywood would put this story on. Eventually she meets Jean (Vincent Lindon, at the peak of his scuffed good looks) with whom she agrees to carpool.
Tensions build in the car as they fail to move; they go out for a pizza, they have sex, they part. And don’t get confused: this isn’t some Richard Linklater gabfest, My Dinner with Andre on a long drive. Most of the dialogue would fit into twenty pages of script. Even when the sex scene arrives, it’s shot in extreme close up, as though these are our hands, our kisses; participants, not observers. There are whole sections of time where Lore is driving through the streets of Paris, us watching her slow progress, like a high art dashcam. It’s a hard film to remember the details of, but easy to remember how it felt. Denis’ films are often about waiting for something to happen rather than fulfilling it: Boni waiting for his bakery beloved to speak to him (Nenette et Boni), Beau Travail’s constant training for a war that never arrives and High Life’s vision of space travel as an endless round of chores and tending.
How do you propose to a producer to help you realise a film like this, built of such unprepossessing parts? It’s not surprising that France – with a near religious adherence to auteur’s rights and an extremely consistent audience for domestic cinema – is the source of this kind of work. Films like these ask things of you as well as offer them, ask you to understand the characters rather than offer you things happening to them. It’s still a gift, but one that’s bought at a price too high, given how freely we expect them most of the time.
Ultimately, it’s just about a Friday night. It’s unlikely that Laure will ever mention the night to her partner, that it will have any effects that last longer than Sunday morning. It doesn’t seem like this affair hints at a rotting core of the commitment she is making to her partner. She and Jean aren’t necessarily right for each other, but they are willing to accept something life offers them, and Denis gives us the space to be entirely with them when they do, to understand why these things happen. Hollywood films insistent on consequence. Yet we also need to make sense of that which is not only banal, but also has no sequel, that doesn’t fit into an overwhelming scheme or logic. We need art for all of these situations, because life is made up of them, more of them than heady board room confrontations.
Other recommendations...
Take This Waltz: certainly more full of incident than Vendredi Soir, but it’s one of the few films that honours women’s right to choose sex without pathologising it. The montage sequence set to Leonard Cohen’s title track is something I think of a lot. Plus it sets a climactic moment to The Buggles!
Jay Z’s ‘Marcy Me’ music video, directed by the Safdie Brothers (thanks IVB).