Customer Reviews

Red Lights

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Originally titled, Feux Rouges, this 2004 mystery/suspense piece from Cedric Kahn will surely please fans of Hitchcock or Chabrol. After reading various reviews, my initial expectation was of a movie like George Sluizer's Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing) but this film has less of the latter's chilly horror. For one thing it ends on a more upbeat note. The movie's strengths lie in it's quiet build-up of suspense and the well sculpted interactions between husband and wife. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon (creator of Inspector Maigret), it tells the story of a constantly inebriated man who misplaces his wife while on a car journey to pick up their children from summer camp. He picks up a hitchhiker who may or may not be an escaped convict. He spends much of the rest of the movie trying to find out what happened to his wife. To tell more would be to spoil the fun.

The movie has been given a very good DVD transfer by Wellspring, in what looks like it's original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (enhanced for widescreen TV). Black levels are nicely rendered which is very important because a large portion of the movie takes place along the roads at night. Colors are well presented and natural. Audio includes both dolby stereo and a 5.1 surround mix with good delivery of the music. I love especially the use of Debussy's Nuages to create both a dreamy as well as a slightly sinister effect when needed. Optional English subtitles are included. All in all a very good DVD and strongly recommended.

Red Lights is a strange, abstract, almost existential exercise in movie making. Adapted from the 1953 novel by Georges Simenon and set to Debussy's elegantly creepy Nuages, writer-director Cedric Kahn offers up movie with attributes of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller.

The feeling of foreboding begins immediately when we meet Antoine Dunant (Jean-Pierre Darroussin a low-level insurance executive. He's just leaving his job to meet his beautiful wife Hélène (Carole Bouquet) in a local café. They are planning to drive to the countryside from Paris to pick up their kids from summer camp.

But as soon as Antoine gets to the café he guzzles three beers back to back with one eye on the street lest his wife arrive before he's suitably fortified. It soon becomes pretty obvious that their marriage is far from happy - Antoine armed with enough drink to sink an elephant, settles into a manner of truculent impetuosity, while Helene remains detached, cold, and almost abusive.

While in the road, Helen discovers that her husband is utterly plastered. She hardly says anything as he weaves all over the road, but her silence speaks volumes. Thus starts a trip of barely controlled hostility with the husband clenching the wheel and brooding, while the wife fumes beside him. Both are so busy bickering with each other and thinking dark thoughts that they're half oblivious to news reports of an escaped convict on the loose nearby.

Antoine isn't usually a drinker, but something has snapped in him, and as the neon signs of the roadside bars start to beckon him, he becomes obsessed with downing as much cold beer and whisky as he can. He leaves Helene angrily waiting in the car while he goes into yet another bar, to prepare himself for the long night ahead.

Hélène, freaked by his increasing belligerence and inability to drive in a straight line, abandons her husband to look for a train station. Meanwhile Antoine strikes up a conversation with a reserved one-armed stranger (Vincent Deniard).

When, minutes later, the stranger steps out of the parking-lot shadows, his face half hidden by the hood of a sweatshirt, and asks for a ride, the cocky, staggering Antoine doesn't even break stride. By now he's so sweaty and drunk that he waves the fellow right into the car.

What follows is detour into a night of terror for Antoine, Helene, and for the viewer. The movie starts to resemble everyone's nightmare - the inexplicable disappearance of a loved one. And as Antoine embarks on a desperate journey to track his wife down, it soon becomes clear that Red Lights is really showing us a portrait of a marriage, a marriage that has been enigmatically hanging by a thread.

Their need to see the children again is probably just a way of distracting them from the aridness of their relationship. She's beautiful and accomplished, while he plain and dull. Somehow the couple began their marriage as equals, but she soon eclipsed him, for which he can't forgive her. Other than this, Kahn provides very little reason as to why their relationship has suddenly gone sour.

What Kahn does provide, however, is the knowledge that marriage can often dissipate completely, leave two strangers in a car, totally sick of each other, in desperate need of a reviving shock to the system. But when the sun finally rises, and Antoine is released from his drunken hell, Kahn does provide a dash of hope for the couple.

In the end, Red Lights is showing that relationships are frail and that the machinations of marriage are often inexplicable. And if nothing else, Antoine and Helen show that it can all dramatically and irrevocably change and fall apart in a searing flash of red light. Mike Leonard September 05.

"Red Lights" (Feux Rouges) is a tightly written, expertly directed (by Cedric Kahn) thriller in the vein of "Frantic." But director Kahn, as adapted by a story by Georges Simenon, has more up his sleeve than a woman-in-distress mystery.
Antoine and Helene are pretty much fed up with each other when they set off by car to pick up their children from summer camp. Helene, a successful lawyer, despises Antoine's drinking and Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a functionary in a large corporation, suspects Helene (a gorgeous Carole Bouquet) of having an affair. The mood is strained, palpably tense and barely civil when they begin their journey from Paris to the south of France. If only Antoine had listened to the traffic news as he stood at the bar having his first whiskey of the day: "Be Careful" intones the TV newsman.
The casting of Darroussin with his worn-in, put-upon face and barely controlled anger and the patrician, upper class, calm yet judging Bouquet is perfect. On the surface they seem so wrong for each other and yet the tension created by their odd pairing draws you to them: How did these two ever get together?
So much of the success of "Red Lights" has to do how well director Kahn succeeds at the creation of a disturbing and almost pathologically desperate mood. With Debussy's "Nuages" playing on the soundtrack, there are many times when you feel that you are watching a dream and that someone will wake up and things will go back to normal. No such luck.

Get the synopsis from other reviewers, I'd just like to say that as a die hard horror fan, I appreciated the great dialouge and character development.

Very old fashioned feel to it, the Hitchcockian comparison is appropriate. The way the film unraveled was masterful, and the conclusion wrapped everything up nicely leaving no loose ends, as I feared it would.

In many ways, this film contains what most big budget horror films are missing these days. There is no realiance on fx and gore (not that that's always a bad thing) to portray the uneasy feeling this one leaves.

I highly reccomend this to all fans of well made horror/suspense that yearn for those vintage chills.

Antoine Dunan (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a middling successful insurance salesman who works out of an office cube next to dozens of others, and his wife, Helene (Carole Bouquet), a successful corporate lawyer, are going to drive south from Paris to pick up their two kids from summer camp. Dunan is unhappy with his life, resents his wife's success, feels he is less than a man. As he says later, "I got sick of playing the good little doggy." He sneaks a couple of whiskeys before they leave, then sneaks a couple more along the way. It doesn't help when the radio reports a couple of car accidents on the highway and the escape of a criminal from a prison in the area. The atmosphere in the car gets chillier and chillier. He and his wife start to bicker. Dunan stops again, and his wife tells him that if he goes into the bar, she's going to drive on by herself to where the children are. He takes the keys and goes into the bar. When he returns, she is gone. A note says that she's taking the train. When he drives to the train station, however, there is no trace of her. What follows is Dunan's increasingly drunken and self-pitying search for his wife, this time with a passenger, a young silent hitch-hiker he has picked up.

I liked this movie a lot. It's a suspense thriller that slowly builds up quite a bit of tension. Only once or twice does explicit violence happen, and it's not too startling when it does. What Kahn accomplishes is to take our expectations that something awful is going to occur and then string us along while the dread builds. There are sequences on the highway at night, sometimes involving long stretches of emptiness, other times involving traffic and police checkpoints, photographed from the driver's position looking forward, that would have made Hitchcock proud. One long sequence has Dunan in a small restaurant trying to locate his wife by making call after call to train stations, police departments, hospitals, the hotel he and his wife were going to stay at. It may sound mundane but the pacing and the acting really bring the viewer (at least this viewer) into the scene. The hitchhiker Dunan picks up creates a long sequence where Dunan, driving and increasingly drunk, and his passenger, silent and surly, create between them a terrific amount of tension.

The conclusion of the movie is not what you'd expect, but is satisfying. The movie is based on a story by George Simenon. I think it's well worth watching. The DVD picture is fine and the subtitles, in yellow, are easy and fast to read.

the French certainly have a special niche for offbeat suspense thrillers.. From clouzot to the french noir of the new wave to the modern high class hitchcock like flicks that grace festival after festival..
'Red lights' is certainly one of the top of the heap - it has the most gripping, edgy, unsettling feeling to it.. You feel like you are on the edge of a cliff about into fall into an unfathomable abyss.. This is a film which taunts you on the most direct psycological levels.. The story is of a man who is at his wits end - who is tired of following the straight and narrow train like path of daily existence.. He wants to find a sort of freedom.. and he does.. but the results, of course, are not quite what one would expect.. This is a very intoxicating movie with an excellent acting performance.. It is a great example of French suspense- but at the same time it is unique - i've never seen anything quite like it.

"Red Lights," (Feux rouges), (2004) is a full-color, 105 minute French film, a crime drama/mystery/thriller, based on a standalone novel by Georges Simenon. He was a 20th century author who was Belgian-born, and undoubtedly the most famous French language master of mysteries: he created Inspector Maigret of the Paris Judiciare, subject of many films. This particular movie was directed by Cedric Kahn,(The 40-Year-Old Virgin). It stars the handsome Carole Bouquet(That Obscure Object of Desire (The Criterion Collection)) as Helene, high-powered corporate lawyer wife of Antoine, played by the everyman-looking Jean-Pierre Darroussin, who's an entirely more ordinary creature entirely, and works at some job in an insurance company, as did Simenon's father.

Antoine and Helene are not getting along well; he's irritated by her demanding job. But they've gotten into the car together to drive to the south of France, there to pick their children up from camp, and then on to Helene's family. Traffic is heavy, as the entire city of Paris heads south "en vacances,"and the atmosphere in the car is increasingly tense. Antoine is drinking heavily, getting drunk and foolish, and stops at one bar too many. He and Helene fight; he orders her to stay in the car, and takes the keys. She says she will take a taxi to the train. When Antoine finally drags himself away from the latest bar, Helene is gone. They will each face a frightening, dangerous, long night alone.

Simenon has been accused by practically every critic of being a misogynist, a charge he always attempted to refute by claiming that he'd slept with 10,000 women: what a defense! But this film and the novel on which it is based certainly seem misogynistic: if only Helene had not been involved in her high-powered job, but had remained barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, reliant on Antoine's income, this ordeal might never have happened to either of them. As is, Antoine gets drunk, and Helene pays for it. However, you'll certainly never get a better view of the French road system, its roadside bars, and the men who drink in them. Antoine keeps running into strange guys in these taverns: Micky Finn plays an Irish rocker spouting philosophy in one. Furthermore, the suspense is screwed tighter and tighter; even on a repeat viewing, I was worried about the couple. Worthy of comparison to Alfred Hitchcock, Anglo-American director of thrillers par excellence (Psycho (Collector's Edition), North By Northwest): worth a look, especially if you're a Simenon fan.

Yes, it's been decades since FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and Bunuel, and Carole Bouquet has no butt, but it's still nice to see her in this movie, even if it is for just a little while.

The star of this movie is a George Castanza type who really knows how to down some beers (not wine), and the bars in this French movie are kinda sleazy, not quaint. Despite some classical music in the background, this movie comes off like some 1980s direct to Cinemax movie, and that's not a bad thing.

This movie is more like THE HITCHER or SOMETHING WILD than any Hitchcock or Chabrol, though of course name dropping those two directors is better advertising. The scenes of drunk driving on a 2-lane road at night are scary/moody enough, there's the cliche of radio music interupted by news of a prison escape, and the cliched evil hitchhiker.

No great thrills, but it's mostly fun, with a long episode akin to a trippy BARFLY.

When you first see this cover, you're thinking sex.
Wrong!
;)

The entire movie revolves around a dysfunctional couple that has to pick their kids up from summer camp.
It was humorous, scary & kept moving for the whole 106 minutes.
It felt very short & had buddy & I laughing the whole time.
The guy was an a55.

well done French drama

Jean-Pierre Darrousin may well be the best actor working in France today, and he's at the top of his game in a rare lead in Cedric Kahn's satisfying Simenon thriller Red Lights/Feux Rouges. Just as well, because he needs to be to sell the idea that he's been married to Carole Bouquet for 12 years (he's a great actor, but no Brad Pitt). With its sinister opening overhead shots of ant-like silhouettes wandering over modern architecture, its shots of an equally unreal freeway populated only by gliding vehicles and its use of a Claude Debussy composition that was clearly an inspiration on Bernard Herrmann's scores, it creates an atmosphere of almost disembodied isolation that's the perfect setting for its potentially hackneyed drama of an arguing husband and wife who are separated after taking an unwise detour on the very night a homicidal convict has escaped from a nearby prison. There are contrivances, but they're at least logical ones, and the film doesn't always head off in the directions you expect it to. But even when it does, it's the execution and the performances which raise the bar here. Neither a masterpiece nor a potential classic, its nonetheless a very welcome and gratifyingly well-crafted road trip.