MOVIE REVIEW | RED LIGHTS

Unhappily Married and on a Low Road

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

September 3, 2004

Directed by Cedric Kahn; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Mr Kahn, Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa and Gilles Marchand, based on the novel by Georges Simenon; director of photography, Patrick Blossier; edited by Yann Dedet; music by Claude Debussy; production designer, Francois Abelanet; produced by Patrick Godeau; released by Wellspring. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Antoine), Carole Bouquet (Helene), Vincent Deniard (Man on the Run), Carline Paul (Waitress) and Jean-Pierre Gos (Inspector).

he brilliant, sinister French thriller "Red Lights," which opens today in New York, is a twisty road movie in which every sign points toward catastrophe. As night falls during the journey of Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), and Helene (Carole Bouquet) Dunan, an unhappily married couple on their way from Paris to Bordeaux, the highway takes them into descending levels of psychosexual hell.

Antoine, a mousy, balding insurance salesman who suggests a dilapidated version of the 60's James Mason, hates his job, and whines out loud that he wants to "live like a man" and "be free." He complains to Helene, a sleek, far more successful corporate lawyer whose success galls him, that's she's too consumed with work. The Dunans are headed south to pick up their two children from summer camp. But even before they leave Paris, the tension between them hangs in the air like stale, sour static with nowhere to escape.

"Red Lights," adapted from a Georges Simenon novel set in America, sustains an appearance of realism even while embracing symbolic and surreal elements. Its eeriness is enhanced by its soundtrack's repetition of excerpts from Debussy's "Nuages." Above all, it is a chilly study of an uncomfortably common breed of male paranoia. A major reason the marriage has turned rancid is that Antoine feels himself less than an equal partner. And with a sly, malicious humor, the film dramatizes his alcohol-fueled rebellion, which precipitates a grisly solution to his masculinity crisis.

The film was directed by Cedric Kahn, whose 1998 film, "L'Ennui," immersed itself in a different kind of sexual paranoia. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, "L'Ennui" followed the descent into pathological obsession of an arrogant middle-aged philosopher who strikes up a casual affair with a woman barely out of adolescence toward whom he feels infinitely condescending. Sexually compliant but emotionally impenetrable, she slowly drives him mad with his desire to possess her out of pride that curdles into abject desperation.

Mr Darroussin's depiction of Antoine as a glowering textbook example of passive-aggression is so uncompromising that Antoine often infuriates you. One way he vents his hostility toward Helene is by secretly drinking during the trip. As you watch him tanking up at rest stops and stoking his resentment while she waits impatiently in the car, your sympathy for him ebbs, and you want to taunt him as a gutless, drunken milquetoast busily destroying himself. Yet the marriage is not lost. There are signs that a core of loyalty still exists between the two.

As Antoine finds himself stuck in crawling traffic, with episodes of gridlock, "Red Lights" reminds you of Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend," and Claire Denis's "Friday Night," movies in which traffic jams are disquieting metaphors for something bigger. Antoine quickly succumbs to road rage, which escalates the more he drinks. Against Helene's wishes, he impulsively turns off the highway onto a darker route, and soon they are lost. Reports on the radio warn of an escaped convict from a prison in Le Mans and that roadblocks have been set up. The tension between the Dunans reaches the breaking point when Helene warns her husband she's going to take the train. Stopping at another bar, he angrily takes the car keys with him.

Inside he is distracted by an English hippie who tells him he's driving in the wrong direction. When he returns, Helene is gone. Driving like a maniac, he desperately tries to catch up with her train but misses each station by minutes.

In another, more ominous bar, he meets a mysterious, silent hitch-hiker (Vincent Deniard) whom he suspects may be the escaped convict, and offers him a lift. The implicit danger in which Antoine puts himself brings out a reckless bravado. Eventually they land inside a forest where Antoine endures a life-changing ordeal that becomes a Hemingway-esque rite of male passage.

The film captures the claustrophobic terror of an unstable driver and hostile passenger trapped in a speeding vehicle. It also conjures a primal dread of violence lurking in the night in strange territory. But its most suspenseful scene takes place the following morning in a diner. Shaken and hung over, Antoine desperately calls every railroad station and hospital in the area for news of his wife.

With a central character who at his most comically disoriented suggests Jacques Tati, "Red Lights" also owes much to Alfred Hitchcock's gallows humor. But it is completely its own movie. And the reverberations of its deceptively easygoing ending should set off debates among analysts of sexual power games in film for years to come.