For most of his directing career, Alfred Hitchcock’s movies were disdained because they were merely genre films: crime thrillers, suspense pictures, spy movies, whatever.
But the more you look at “North by Northwest” or “Rear Window” or “Vertigo,” the less important the settings become, and the more you realize the obsessive focus on a very human situation: What happens when a person is going along in life, complacent, normal, and suddenly veers off on the wrong road one day, only to discover that the road leads directly into the abyss. (Or to the Bates Motel, in “Psycho.”)
I was thinking about this while I was watching “Red Lights,” a very Hitchcockian movie. Director Cedric Kahn doesn’t imitate ol’ Alfred, but he brilliantly pursues a similar idea: the ordinary schnook whose life goes off the rails.
The schnook is Antoine, a dumpy, balding, middle-age man. He and his wife Helene are leaving Paris to drive to the south of France, where their children are waiting to be picked up at summer camp. Helene is much more chic than Antoine, and seems to have a better job than him. Otherwise, their life is orderly.
He doesn’t drink much, but on this day he drinks. (And he hides it from her, fearing her scolding.) On their drive south, he jumps off the crowded main drag and gets on a side road. Naturally, Helene thinks this is a mistake.
After a quarrel outside a bar, Antoine goes inside for another drink. Helene disappears. And from there, the night becomes a spiral into danger that Antoine could never have expected … although perhaps he desired this chaos, in some perverse way.
“Red Lights” is based on a novel by the prolific and popular Georges Simenon, and Kahn (director of “L’Ennui”) treats it in a calm, clear-eyed style. Occasionally he floods the soundtrack with Debussy’s dreamlike “Nuages,” as though in counterpoint to the story.
The red lights of the title appear everywhere onscreen. They have a double function: warning lights, for sure, but also the emblem of the kind of rules that are driving Antoine crazy. He doesn’t want to stop at red lights anymore.
Carole Bouquet is just right as Helene, but for most of the movie we’re watching Jean-Pierre Darroussin, who plays Antoine. He is one of the least likely leading men you’ll ever see, but he perfectly embodies the ordinary guy who just loses a cog one day. If you were standing next to him having a drink at a bar, you’d barely notice him, but there’s a whole Hitchcock movie going on beneath the surface.
“Red Lights” HHHH
Think Hitchcock: Brilliant look at a middle-age couple whose life goes off the tracks while driving from Paris to the south one weekend. Dumpy Jean-Pierre Darroussin is perfect as the ordinary guy who drops into the abyss, Hitchcock style. (In French, with English subtitles.)
Rated: Not rated; probably R for violence, subject matter.
Now showing: Seven Gables, Seattle.
“Red Lights”
Think Hitchcock: Brilliant look at a middle-age couple whose life goes off the tracks while driving from Paris to the south one weekend. Dumpy Jean-Pierre Darroussin is perfect as the ordinary guy who drops into the abyss, Hitchcock style. (In French, with English subtitles.)
Rated: Not rated; probably R for violence, subject matter.
Now showing: Seven Gables, Seattle.
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