Feux rouges (2004)

Feux rouges is a French thriller film first released in 2004, directed by Cédric Kahn.  The film is based on a novel by Georges Simenon and stars Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Charline Paul and Jean-Pierre Gos.  It has also been released under the title: Red Lights.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


At the start of a busy weekend on the roads, stressed insurance agent Antoine and his wife Hélène set out from Paris to collect their two children from a holiday colony in the south-west of France.  Almost immediately, the couple are at each other’s throats.   Hélène is annoyed that Antoine has been drinking, and Antoine suspects his wife may be seeing another man.  After a heated argument, Hélène threatens to continue the journey alone if Antoine stops for another drink.  Antoine calls her bluff, but when he returns to his car after a quick call to a bar, his wife has disappeared.  Seized by panic, he hurries off to try to find her.  His nightmare has only just begun...

Feux rouges is another highly recommended film from the talented and provocative director Cédric Kahn, bearing some striking similarities with his earlier Roberto Succo (2000).  Both films are what might loosely be termed existentialist road movie thrillers, in which the central character is driven by an uncontrollable self-destructive impulse into an increasingly darker and deeper private Hell from which there is seemingly no escape.  In contrast to the extreme nihilist bleakness of Robert Succo, Feux rouges is a somewhat lighter film, with a deceptively banal storyline and some oddly surreal moments which make you ponder whether it is intended to be a black comedy.

This is certainly Cédric Kahn’s most unpredictable and unsettling film to date, mainly because it blurs the boundaries between objective reality and subjective experience, to the extent that nothing is to be taken at face value.  Despite its threadbare plot and minimalist design – most of the story takes place in the front of a car - Feux rouges is a thoroughly compelling work.  This is partly down to Kahn’s slick mise-en-scène (which seems to owe a great deal to Hitchcock and other great thriller directors), but much of the credit goes to Jean-Pierre Darroussin, who turns in the most intense performance, and his cinematographer Patrick Blossier, whose work is both beautiful and strangely chilling.

There is a searing truth to Darroussin’s darkly introspective portrayal of a neurotic man anticipating the break-up of his marriage and the collapse of his world. Whilst this hardly makes for comfortable viewing, the film exerts a tight vice-like grip that compels us to keep watching, to see just where Antoine’s physical and metaphysical journey into Hell will end up.  A dark and fascinating film, and probably the most inspired adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel to date.

© James Travers 2008

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