Friday Night

A film that takes place over one night in Paris. Laure is moving the next day. Her things are in boxes and she is going to her boyfriend's flat. She will have dinner with friends on the last night. She gets into the car and sets off. The city is locked. Public transport is on strike and the traffic does not move. There is an announcement on the radio. Drivers are asked to pick up pedestrians. A man opens the door and gets in. His name is Jean. They do not talk, do not look at each other, and the car stays where it is. Then Laure calls her friends and says she will not come. From there the film enters a single night. A restaurant, a hotel room, a pizzeria and the streets. What the narrative is interested in is not love but an interval: before entering the life that starts tomorrow, Laure becomes nobody for one night, and the film builds this not as an escapade but as a threshold. There is almost no dialogue. The two speak a handful of sentences across the film and we learn their names late. The image is very close. The camera is on hands, on skin, on breath in the glass and on traffic lights; the city is blurred and warm. The narrative departs from realism. At one point the signs move and the setting briefly abandons its rules. The music is by Dickon Hinchliffe. The source is Emmanuèle Bernheim's novel; the author worked on the screenplay too. Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon are the cast. Claire Denis directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes sensory cinema without words. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story; the narrative runs across one night, almost nothing is said, and when morning comes nothing is explained.