Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what the person is actually thinking. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event that is so singular, and so evanescent, that it has no significance: it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.
Friday Night
Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what it might mean. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event whose singularity is such that it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.