Such a frustrating disappointment

Just perfect...

Admirable film.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The first few seconds of 'Feux Rouges' show Antoine - a mid-age Parisian insurance agent - writing a loving mail to his wife on the verge of a family vacation. The last few seconds of the movie show the couple exchanging loving smiles while driving to the South where they would pick the children from a camp to continue together the vacation. Everything goes wrong in the in-between.'Feux Rouges' starts as a relationship drama and turns into a thriller and a wrong-turn movie. It is inspired by a novel of the Georges Simenon, and as many of Simenon's novels the characters are far from being great communicators. The lack of communication, the routine and maybe the differences in social positions make of Antoine an unhappy husband who is ready to spoil the start of the vacations by heavy drinking while on road. Much of the movie happens on the road, and the gradual tension building picking with the disappearance of the wife Helen strikes a cord of uneasiness and even claustrophobia - great achievement for a film filmed on highways and roads with the sky almost permanently on view. As in many of Simenon's novels there is a moralistic twist, and justice is made even if it is completely the result of hazard and not of the will of men. And there is a huge price to pay for this justice, which we only can guess as it happens out of the screen and story time.Director Cedric Kahn has learned a few lessons in thrillers from the great masters, and fist of all from Hitchcock. Antoine is wonderfully played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin as the type of character that we know from the very first moment that he will get into trouble and he indeed does all to confirm this, but it is the character of Helene played by Carole Bouquet that he relates to all the time and who is his focal point of frustration, worry and love.The simplicity of the story telling, the careful gradation of tension towards horror, the low key ending which does not solve the conflict, but just postpones it beyond the duration of the screening make of this film a worth watching piece of cinema.

How many Simenon 's novels have been transferred to the screen? Probably more than you can think of for there were already plenty of them in the thirties.Some were even remade(Duvivier's masterpiece "Panique" was remade as "M.Hire" ).In 2004,it's funny to see Simenon's characters using computers.This movie owes a lot to its two actors:the always reliable Darroussin and Carole Bouquet who in fact has only a supporting part,her male co-star being on the screen twice as long as her.A couple whose marriage seems on the rock hit the road .They are to pick up their children in their holiday camp.This is a road movie ,the action taking place around a highway between Paris , Tours and Poitiers and ending in Chatellerault.The man has become a heavy drinker cause he knows his wife does not love him anymore .She disappears in the night.He is told she's taken a taxi to get to the railway station to travel by train.The desperate husband takes a(not very sweet) hitch- hiker aboard .At dawn,it seems that something very horrible happened during the night.It does not really renew Simonesque adaptations (and I must admit I could name at least ten films better than this one,even if I did not include the excellent Gabin/Maigret/Delannoy films of the fifties) but it's a good film ,depicting a bleak inhuman highway ,high anxiety (Darroussin gives at least ten phone calls in ten minutes),and proof positive that from evil,something which looks like love can be born again.

While it starts off as typically overwrought melodrama, with a couple shouting in each other's face (making the first half of the film fairly dull), it subsequently turns into a reasonably gripping thriller - highlighted by a couple of effective shock moments - with an especially ironic conclusion pretty much in the Claude Chabrol mode. The acting of the two leads is fine, Jean-Pierre Darroussin making the most of his unsympathetic character while Carole Bouquet, appropriately, plays a character named Helene (after a number of heroines from Chabrol movies); however, there is some unintentional hilarity during the husband's boozing odyssey, first by encountering a grating Irish rocker in a bar and later being beaten up by an escaped convict to whom he gives a lift in his car!

"Red Lights", a subtitled French film, spends it's 1.75 hour run following Antoine (Darroussin) and his wife Hélène (Bouquet) as they leave Paris for a night drive to Bordeaux to pick up their kids. What should have been an ordinary road trip turns into an extraordinary series of events which will leave the couple forever changed. The less you know about these events prior to viewing the better as any hint of what happens could lead to a case of mistaken genre and spoilage. This film is a human drama which doesn't attempt to entertain with extremes but rather opts to engross with a slowly seductive tale of intrigues kept to realistic proportion. "Red Lights" relies heavily on the ability to identify with the adult married couple and the problems they encounter and, therefor, will play best with mature adult audiences. A nicely managed, methodical and very believable film which spends most of its time with Darroussin, "Red Lights" received good marks from critics and public alike and is well worth a look by mature viewers into French flicks. (B+)