Friday Night by Claire Denis 2002

Friday Night by Claire Denis 2002

I have seen two more movies of the director after the last entry; one was Beau Travail and the other was the entry's title. 

Friday Night was rather dull even if the movie's subject was to deal with frustration itself: a subway strike in Paris. The theme and the way the movie's conveying the concept and the logic  were corresponding to it. It still was slow and I often got frustrated during the watch.    & nbsp;

The movie was about this sophisticated and independent woman, Laura's, seemingly the last night of her living alone in the urban set. She was moving into with her boyfriend and finishing up her final cleaning and sorting what was to be thrown out and what was not. She went out into the night in the city on a strike where a trasportation system was paralysed. Caused by the unusual situation, the traffic was extremely jammed and it was encouraged to offer among each other to share a car. A guy came to the protagonist's car looking for a ride so she offered him to share her car. And she ended up offering another ride later at the night; she stayed with the guy who remained unkown to her in a hotel room and had an intimate time together.

The point of the narrative is to tell how unusual it is for a woman to have a real good sex with no string attached nor any unecessary entanglement followed. The very final scene, where Laura's joyfully trotting as if to express how mush she benefitted the last night's sexual encounter and still intact physically, emotionally and morally in the morning light, seems to serve the subject matter.

Beau Travail was loosely based on Herman Melville's Billy Budd but moved the set to the deserted landscape in Dibourti. Sergent Galoup in French Legion finds his calm life begin to be disturbed when a new recruit Sentain joins his troop.

This intricate tale of a power struggle among an exclusively male environment and what a twist homoeroticism does to one's mind and the community.