The movie posters and press packets all describe Cedric Kahn'slatest road-trip thriller "Red Lights" as Hitchcockian, but abetter comparison might be Kahn's countryman Henri-George Clouzot -"the French Hitchcock."
In one of Clouzot's most famous films, "Wages of Fear" (1953), agroup of down-and-outs drive truckloads of nitroglycerine to an oilrefinery in South America. The trucks are rickety, the roads arerough, and the nitro explodes at the drop of a feather. Needless tosay, it's a film that a nice manicure wouldn't survive.
"Red Lights" replaces Clouzot's nitro with an unhappily marriedcouple, an antiseptic level of booze and an increasingly forebodingopen-road to create an equally explosive film. Like "Wages," everybump and jitter, physical and emotional, is amplified to such anextent that even the road signs seem to be bristling with enoughbad vibes to pop off the screen.
Antoine (French actor Jean-Pierre Daroussian) is a supremelyunlikable Milquetoast with a drinking problem. Along with his icywife Helene (Carole Bouquet, alumna from Bunuel's "That ObscureObject of Desire"), the couple leave their Parisian home to embarkon a driving tour of the Basque country for the long holidayweekend.
Things are bad from the start: The nightly news foretellstraffic jams and roadside deaths, a killer has escaped from a localprison and, worst of all, Antoine has begun to drink.
Sitting statuesque and rigid with Gallic beauty, Helene is astudy in contrast to the pug-nosed, swarthy Antoine. The few wordsthese unattractive opposites mutter bares this dissociation.Antoine gripes about his lost manhood and knocks backdouble-Scotches like a sailor on one-hour shore leave, while Helenethreatens to leave if Antoine's erratic driving doesn't straightenout.
It doesn't, and the next thing we know Helen has been replacedby a note - "I'll take the train" - and a menacing hitchhiker(Vincent Deniard) who hides his right hand deep in his jacketpocket. Is he concealing a gun, a jailhouse tat, or somethingall-together worse?
United now with his real better half, Antoine continues hisbender into the French countryside with only the blustery neon ofdive-bars lighting the way. Bizarre dreams, car wrecks, and policebarricades proliferate.
"A bit of friendly advice," says Antoine's mysterious drivingcompanion at the latter, "don't breathe in their face."
The first hour is "Red Lights" at its most concise andunrelenting; it's also when Kahn really does earn his Hitchcockcomparisons.
Like Hitch, Kahn keeps the movie grounded firmly in thedisintegrating universe of his beleaguered protagonist, onlycutting away for reaction shots and roadside oddities - anupside-down plaster cow bolted to the ceiling of a bar, a strandedcommuter covered in blood - which seem more and more likeprojections of Antoine's own fractured mental landscape.
The end result of this claustrophobic mise-en-scene is a tensionso thick that you could cut it with a knife - or the broken neck ofa whiskey bottle. In fact, the biggest let-down in "Red Lights" isthe inevitable unraveling of the movie's finely wroughttautness.
Antoine wakes up the next morning with his car in a ditch andthe events of last night pounding in his head. As he begins topiece back together his life, we're treated to a final twist thatseems oddly standard and unaffecting after the film's firsthalf.
Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, a crime writer who combinedthe pulp existentialism of James M. Cain with the detectiveprocedurals of Agatha Christie to become one of the most eminentlyadaptable French writers, "Red Lights" has a kind of garbledRousseauist message to impart before it's finished.
The film begins with shots of cold, stately Modernist sculpturesin Paris and ends on a verdant back-road near the Pyrenees.Somewhere in between lies the no-man's land between Nature andCivilization, a place where Antoine will abandon the nagging wivesand red lights that plague him, leaving him with only his ownviolent, pathetic existence staring back.
