Friday Night
Sensuality and political consciousness are Claire Denis' favored topics.
Her best films, Chocolat, Beau Travail and I Can't Sleep, interweave those
themes and her latest, Friday Night, virtually shouts them outright. In the grip of a single evening, a woman and man meet casually, then intimately. It's a commingling of their physical instincts and-this is the special source of Denis tempo and suspense-their unspoken awareness of socially structured desire. The simple yet complex acts between Laure (Valerie Lemercier) and Jean (Vincent Lindon) are another Denis pantomime of civilization's basis. Between themselves, this man and woman are flaunting and creating a temporary, instantaneous society.
Denis' movies are characterized by a lack of romanticism, even though she assays topics that at first seem quintessentially romantic. As much as Ken Loach in Sweet Sixteen, her intelligence forces her to go against the grain of movie cliche. Her oeuvre includes a heritage drama that is existential (Chocolat), a colonial epic that is homoerotic (Beau Travail), a serial killer film about caste (I Can't Sleep) and a vampire movie about the hierarchies of social control (Trouble Every Day). This time Denis subverts the sex film by submitting it to an astringent analysis of what motivates two people's private and public behavior.
Laure and Jean meet during a city-wide traffic jam that symbolizes the stasis of convention and their own dark loneliness. Their intimacy is no more revealing to themselves than to us. Denis' voyeurism doesn't lead to knowledge, only to more mystery. The reflexive "Why?" is no matter; the deeper "Why?" is disturbing because it indicates Laure and Jean's willingness to subvert their own social order.
Since this is Denis' version of Brief Encounter (allowing a woman the autonomy of picking up a one-night-stand just before her proper wedding-a deliberate transgression), Friday Night perplexes as an especially French
thing. It contains a degree of fantasy and cosmopolitan sophistication about sex that differs from the puritanical Anglo-American style. In exploring the mystery of eroticism, Denis is interested in its vibrancy when it opposes formal social behavior. Using the sleek, detailed technique she has polished into a tactile sensibility, Denis' storytelling is attenuated as usual, and you may long for the satisfactions of conventional narrative, but it stays interesting-perhaps even unsettling. She forcefully brings your personal morality into question.
There are almost no chart hits on Sweet Sixteen's soundtrack to hype the story of 15-year-old Liam (Martin Compston), a Scots drop-out approaching his next birthday with fuck-all to do. The one hit you do hear (Robbie Williams' "Let Me Entertain You," played at an ex-convict's reunion celebration) seems to point out what's really going on in the average teen movie. That difference is as much director Ken Loach's point, as is Liam's frustration.
Not since DeSica's Shoeshine (1947) or Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950) has a contemporary movie examining the conditions that corrupt youth been as powerful as Sweet Sixteen. In the decades since those landmarks, the advent of commercial youth culture has produced a high number of youth dramas that do no more than flatter the self-absorption and marketable fatalism of young audiences-especially the many specious hiphop movies. But Loach eschews typical pop blandishments.
Continuing the semi-documentary approach he pioneered in the 60s, Loach has defied "entertainment" while also redefining it. Seeking out the social classes most filmmakers ignore (Britain's frustrated workers, far from London-in fact, frequently Scottish, Welsh or Irish, undereducated or on the dole), he uses non-coercive techniques that require one be alert to observable reality (rather than enjoying how smoothly a story plays out). Loach isn't interested in movies as relaxed entertainment but as intense illustrations of how life actually plays out. Yes, Mike Leigh obviously learned from Loach's example, and outstripped it with his own cagey introduction of theatrical/cinematic intimacy.
Loach, however, maintains a rigorous, politicized integrity, in this case applying loose immediacy to Paul Laverty's screenplay. Liam's urgent need to break away from a callous stepfather and grandfather, to find some alternative to his unsatisfying daily routine, presents a drama of personal turmoil, yet Loach preserves a cool, nearly detached awareness that despite whatever his characters do, they cannot deflect society's impact. Liam is not an MTV consumerist cliche but a reflection of the desperation and indifference that surround him. Like those DeSica and Buñuel youths who were post-war casualties, Liam is a boy left out in the moral collapse we've come to take for granted.
You can almost count the number of Loach's infrequent close-ups. He resists getting in tight (recalling the distance the Dardenne brothers kept from their subjects in The Son). The petty mischief that Liam enjoys with his mate Pinball (William Ruane) is so ordinary it leads to the banality of wasted time. With no need to get any closer to Everykid's pitiful portion of liberty, Loach emphasizes the limited options-the boys who deliver pizza and those who become drug couriers. As such stories become familiar (Sweet Sixteen follows in the honorable line of Erick Zonca's The Little Thief, Shane Meadow's A Room for Romeo Brass and Charles Stone III's Paid in Full), we get cinematic evidence of a worldwide youth crisis. Loach's film indicts the insufficiencies of most modern societies that have yet to find a way to keep its young people from drifting.
Loach doesn't make a simplistic critique as in some of his propagandistic films; his artistry shows in that tension present in Liam and his sister Chantelle's (Annmarie Fulton) poignant attempt at preserving family. He finds art in Compston's face: a smile that is beguiling and an avidity that is defensive. "How can you care for anybody else when you don't care for yourself," Chantelle says, stanching her brother's injuries after a fight. It would be a motherly cliche if Loach didn't clearly, scarily, demonstrate that Liam has developed an inward protectiveness that will not break.
If you understand this film's title as an anachronism, then you might be prepared for the full force of the tragedy Loach depicts. Liam hasn't got a relaxed coming-out; his life is screwed up by his parents' mishaps and the pathos of Scotland's underclass life. Still, Loach doesn't promise an ironic spree like the obnoxious Trainspotting (remember that tripe?). From the moment Liam trades cuss-words with his grandfather to the frightening view of Liam's three-year-old nephew Calum in the backseat of a stolen car, I didn't spot a single sensationalized or maudlin moment. (Even when Liam steals his granddad's dentures, it's more than comic revenge; it's pathetic heritage).
Loach's unsentimental view accounts for the fact that many teenagers never get a sweet sixteen party; they may, in fact, long for something more basic. Focusing his dream on a trailer-house complete with new utilities that he sees near a lakeside, Liam thinks he can finance it with drug money. The consequences are precipitate without seeming false, which, in turn, refocuses Liam's desperation. Loach evinces a finer appreciation for an impoverished kid's desire than the arty condescension of Lynne Ramsey's Ratcatcher (which the trailer incident recalls perhaps to intentionally reprove).
Sweet Sixteen evokes the mastery of Shoeshine and Los Olvidados before it suggests the more recent mastery of Mike Leigh's All or Nothing, because Loach's story connects with a truth about human behavior that is classical yet rarely touched: ruined innocence. When Liam gets taken in by a local drug lord, he is given a trial that tests more than his loyalty. Desperation becomes Liam's only rule. The symbolic knife Loach introduces into the story cuts both ways-in ways you cannot foresee, but that wound very deeply.