There is a moment in Claire Denis’s Friday Night in which thirtysomething Laure (Valerie Lemercier) gazes through a diner window at Jean (Vincent Lindon), as he offers advice to a pretty teenaged girl regarding a pinball technique. At this point in the film, we know the following: Laure was on her way to dinner with friends the night before she is supposed to move in with her significant other; there is a strike-induced traffic jam in the city of Paris preventing her travel; as a result of the traffic jam motorists are being urged to offer rides to Parisians on foot; Jean is one of those Parisians, and before he leaves, their brief interactions are colored by a tangible sexual spark. Save the details—we’ll get back to those later—that’s really all the narrative there is to offer, and by the time Laure gazes through that window after locating her disbanded passenger, we’re halfway through the movie.

When Friday Night screened at the 2002 NYFF, that gaze—at once dopey and devastating—resonated with a chilling sadness that left the festival audience unquestionably stirred. At a recent screening in a New York cineplex, however, the same gaze garnered a considerable group laugh from an audience not nearly as enamored of Denis’s unorthodox casting of a French actress known primarily for her work as comedienne; neither the first nor the last time the audience scoffed at an awkward, unglamorized moment of intimacy with Laure’s plain-visage. While a number of teary-eyed NYFF patrons sniffled their way to the exit at the close of the film, the downtown arthouse resounded in a credit-accompanying chortle, an erudite film-goer behind me urging his disappointed date to view Denis’s “far-greater” films,” “the vampire movie, and oh, Boo Travale.”

But an apparent split in audience reaction to Friday Night has no doubt been reinforced by a similar rift in critical opinion. While the film garnered gushing accolades from a handful of prominent critics, an equally emphatic troupe of venerated writers have dismissed Friday Night, most often as a laborious plunge into clichéd sex-fantasy territory; an unlikely and unwelcome move from one of the most original filmmakers working today. A perfunctory survey of Denis-loving acquaintances produced the same results: There were those who fell for Friday Night, and those who fell asleep.

But even those who loved it, admit to the film’s enigmatic appeal; admirers—critics included— often allude to a “feeling”that the film exudes, a “sexiness” tough to pinpoint. Though it’s a film about two strangers and a one night stand, that’s often the last thing out of a fan’s mouth when applauding Denis’s mastery. Offering the narrative seems all but useless, as there’s little to say regarding Friday Night’s bare story line except that it’s about as pared down as it gets; after Laure and Jean reunite, they go to a hotel, make love, and get pizza before returning to the boudoir. Throughout, there is little dialogue, no voiceover, remarkably tame sex. Needless to say, the lackluster story receives the brunt of the criticism; it’s an easy target, and a misleading one to boot.

In an attempt to account for the difficulties of elaborating Friday Night’s pleasures, I’ll say this: Denis’s film exists in a kind of liminal space, both her characters and language move through a transitory environment concerned not with concrete events, but the electrically charged ellipses that run between them. If it is hard to see, it’s even harder to write about, but on-screen Denis’s unflinching interest in the subtleties of human interaction has never been more apparent.

Under the scrutiny of cinematographer Agnès Godard’s discerning lens, the fleeting interchanges between Laure and Jean leading up to their sexual encounter become epic transactions that speak to the inestimable complexities of erotic interaction. Under a cinematic microscope considering all that often goes unsaid and unshown, a relationship is conceived. From Chocolat (1988) to Beau travail (1999), Denis has always exercised a mastery of ellipsis in her films, an economy in her editing practices so defined the fan’s eye can find the auteur in a splice, but it is that very in-between space with which Friday Night is concerned and it seems fitting that France’s reigning queen of elliptical editing further investigate those moments so often left on her cutting room floor.

Saturating every frame with palpable sensuality, her eye understands the calculated brevity of a glance, the monumental weight of a calm hand on a nervous one, and the imponderable power play involved in sexual vulnerability. From shot to shot, Godard’s lilting camera not only considers but translates the seemingly ineffable language of human chemistry to the screen, eliciting guttural reactions to subtle eroticism Hollywood reduces to an awkward laugh from Julia Roberts or a girl-next-door grin from the ubiquitous J. Lo. In what is (in film language) too often considered interim minutiae, Denis sees a love story enmeshed in fleeting missives, Jean to Laure, and back.

Like another French filmmaker unconcerned (or very concerned) with cinema’s excesses, Robert Bresson, it’s as if Denis shows us everything we normally don’t need and leaves out everything we do. But what results is utterly enchanting, a sparse narrative pregnant with life that American auteurs P.T. Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love) and David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls) should envy; Denis’s self proclaimed “experiments” with a case-specific visual language, result in a film for hopeless romantics that resonates more honestly than the finest moment in Adam Sandler’s acting career, than the geekiest love-struck dialogue Gordon Green can muster.

Many know that the literary source on which the film is based advances through Laure’s internalized perspective, and you need not be a cinephile to recognize that in translation to the screen, that often begets voiceover. But it’s safe to say that Denis’s Friday Night—entirely free of that convention—would be just as effective as a silent film; not only has she made this magical night in Paris her own, but Denis has applied her medium with such consideration for its unique properties of elucidation through image and montage, that one wonders how it could ever have been progeny of the page.

It is, then, about the details in Friday Night, and depending on how you regard Denis’s purely cinematic vision, the exploits of Laure and Jean are either mundane or mystical. If it is a film of transitory moments possessing immeasurable weight, their tryst on the eve of Laure’s new life is that final dive into uncouth daydream that grants us a moment of freedom from the realities of real-world relationship. Like the gaze that cements Laure’s longing for Jean on the night before, her exit from their hotel room as the sun sheds its morning light on the now-barren streets of Paris, speaks to the oft-forgotten power of passion as a liberating force. And for those of us who still believe in angelic strangers who—if only for a night—might steal us away from the real world, Denis’s inspired ode to romance offers not only sublime cinema, but added incentive to hit the bustling city streets.
—MATTHEW PLOUFFE