It's a summer holiday weekend in Paris. Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a timid insurance salesman, and his lawyer wife Helene (Carole Bouquet) are off to the south of France to pick up their children from camp. They being to quarrel while on the road. He pulls over for a drink at a bar along the highway. When he returns, she is gone. He dashes to the train station to try to meet her but is too late. Darkness has fallen, and left alone to continue the journey, Antoine picks up a strange hitchhiker, not knowing he might have already crossed paths with his soon-to-be-missing wife. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon (Maigret), Cedric Kahn's (L'Ennui, Roberto Suco) edge-of-your-seat thriller masterfully evokes he films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol.
(15 votes)
2.
A brilliant Hitchcockian exercise from director Cedric Kahn: A middle-aged couple drives south from Paris to pick up their kids at camp. On the way, the husband drinks, the wife nags, and they get off on the wrong road at night. From there, it's the kind of downward spiral that would have made even Hitchcock shiver, with a clear-eyed sense of the abyss that might suddenly open in the course of ordinary existence. Like his fellow French Hitchcock enthusiast Claude Chabrol, Kahn has a keen eye for catching the uneasy vibrations beneath an apparently dull domestic situation, and he builds the story with a steady, terrible momentum. Glamorous Carole Bouquet is dead-on as the wife, but the movie is carried by Jean-Pierre Darroussin, the dumpy-faced, balding actor who exudes regular-schnook status. He captures a man who gets more danger than he bargained for--but maybe a little of what he wanted. --Robert Horton
(15 votes)
3.
Starring French cinema legends Carole Bouquet (THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE) and Jean-Pierre Darroussin (UN AIR DE FAMILLE), director Cedric Kahn's thriller, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, features dry humor and Hitchcockian suspense. The relationship between Antoine (Darroussin) and Helene (Bouquet) is deteriorating. Helene spends more time at work, Antoine drinks, and the two act like mere acquaintances, not lovers. When Antoine stops at a bar and Helene threatens to continue without him, a fight erupts between them. Angry and drunk, Antoine insists on staying in the bar, but when he emerges he finds the car empty, save for a note saying that Helene has left for the train. In a drunken stupor, Antoine attempts to follow his wife's trail, joined by a mysterious and dangerous hitchhiker, without realizing that the obvious way to find her has been in front of him the entire time.
Bouquet and Darroussin play off each other beautifully. Darroussin convincingly plays a man who has lost himself. And Bouquet is strong as a wife who has placed her husband at the bottom of her priority list. That a tragedy is the one thing that can help them repair their fractured marriage feels palpably realistic. At its heart, RED LIGHTS is an exploration of intimacy, love, and what it takes to build a successful relationship, but the film also provides satisfying humorous chills and nice dose of suspense.
(15 votes)
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