Red Lights

After a lifetime spent working under cars, Tim Burke finally retired.

Like Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993), French film Red Lights documents the escalating rage of a man who feels so enfeebled by wife and world that he can only reclaim his masculinity through violence. Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is a hangdog insurance company employee; his beautiful wife, Hélène (Carole Bouquet), is a successful lawyer.

The film opens with the couple preparing to pick up their children from summer camp. The pair arrange to meet at a bar. Hélène's late, and Antoine drinks heavily while he waits. When they finally leave Paris, it's amid heat, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and reports of a police hunt for a dangerous fugitive. The simmering Antoine, who at every opportunity fuels his resentment with alcohol, is goaded first by Hélène’s lateness, then by the traffic jams, and then by his own sense of inferiority. The couple bicker, and at every chance Antoine interrupts their journey to drink at bars, becoming more drunk and overtly resentful toward his wife after each stop.

When Antoine emerges from a bar at one such stop, he finds a note from Hélène saying that she intends to continue the journey south by train. Antoine careers off in pursuit. Along the way he – somewhat inevitably – encounters the fugitive (Vincent Deniard), towards whom he feels not fear, but admiration. To Antoine's increasingly bleary eyes, the fugitive is a "king" and a "lord", a man untrammelled by the emasculating strictures of either society or more successful spouses. Having dramatised Antoine's reasons for forming this view of masculinity, the film's second half cleverly subverts it.

Directed by Cedric Kahn, Red Lights, although well received overseas, is a pedestrian thriller. The central character is a charmless victim not of society but of his own character defects. As such, it's difficult to muster much interest in his plight. The script, adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, is fatally lacking in thrills, and the cinematography and editing lacking in verve and imagination.

So if you're thinking of spending your hard-earned on this film, I'd take heed of its title: stop.

-- Hans Fruck