Feux rouges

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with two primary characters: university academic Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver), who investigates claims of paranormal phenomena, and her assistant Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy), a physicist. The audience is provided with an insight into the world of the opening section's primary characters while concurrently observing the public reemergence of a psychic, Simon Silver (Robert De Niro).
The ending of the film's first half is signified by the sudden death of Matheson from a chronic vascular condition at the same time that one of Silver's comeback performances takes place, an incident that is particularly significant due to the death of a former nemesis of Silver, a skeptic who investigated the psychic's work, under similar circumstances. Matheson also had a previous encounter with Silver. She recounted a public meeting when Silver had, for an instant, got the best of her by bringing up the subject of her son's spirit (her son was in a vegetative coma and on life support). Matheson agrees only to appear on a televised panel in anticipation of Silver's return. Prior to her death, Matheson refuses to cooperate with Buckley's insistent call to undertake another investigation of Silver, warning Buckley against such an undertaking due to her previous experience with the psychic.
However, following Matheson's death, the assistant becomes increasingly obsessed with investigating Silver for the purpose of exposing the popular psychic as a fraud. During Buckley's efforts to reveal Silver's large-scale trickery, a series of inexplicable events occurs — electronic devices explode, dead birds appear, and Buckley's laboratory is vandalized. Buckley's paranoia intensifies, as he believes Silver is behind these incidents. Buckley's calm and rational disposition eventually degenerates into an obsessiveness that resembles the late Matheson's intense antipathy to paranormal claims. As part of the introduction to the climactic section of the film, Silver agrees to participate in an investigation proposed by an academic from the same university that Matheson was employed by, and Buckley joins the observation team for the tests.
In the final moments of the film, Buckley's assistants manage to reveal the manner in which Silver defrauds the public through a close analysis of the test footage accumulated by Buckley from the university's investigation. At the same time, Buckley exposes Silver at one of the psychic's public performances, and Silver is left dumbfounded. Buckley then reveals to the viewer that he actually possesses paranormal abilities and has been responsible for the inexplicable incidents that have occurred during his investigation of Silver. In a letter to his late mentor, Buckley explains a realization in which he arrives at an understanding that his decision to work with Matheson, despite the possibility of loftier career opportunities as a physicist, was the result of an unconscious attempt to seek others like himself; the revelation clarifies that Buckley's choices were made in spite of his conscious denial of the existence of paranormal activity (such denial is touched on earlier in the film, whereby the character implies that he chose this career because his mother was delayed from seeking critical medical treatment due to advice from a fraud psychic). The letter to Matheson ends with regret that Buckley denied her the consolation of knowing that there is something more, and that now she deserved even more, "everything." Buckley then turns off the life-support machine that is keeping Matheson's son alive. He then walks out of the hospital and concludes his letter to the deceased Matheson: "You can't deny yourself forever".

Tags: suspenseful, murder, flashback

Review:
As the story unfolds, the viewer is driven increasingly into unease by the movie's primary conceit: the sudden unraveling of the milquetoast male lead before and then during a road trip into the country (in the throng of traffic during French vacation season) to pick up the couple's kids from camp.
This ultimately has disastrous consequences for both husband and wife, despite their separating early in the story.There are very effective touches here, unique to the French thriller.
En route to collecting their kids from summer camp, 'married alive' couple Antoine (Pierre-Darroussin) and Helene (Bouquet) bicker in the car, as Antoine accuses her of cramping his style.
'I got sick of playing the good little doggie', Antoine tells his mysterious hitchhiker, in one of the movie's most memorable exchanges.
Kahn and Laurence Ferreira Barbosa takes the Georges Simenon story from America to France.The most interesting thing about Antoine is that he is an ordinary man.
There are a lot of clues, but as detectives, the director is asking us to stay attentive to what is really going on, or isn't.The film belongs to Jean Pierre Darroussin.
We know that Helene cares for Antoine at the end of the film when the two meet at the hospital.
The first thing to take note in Red Lights is that the story is not rushed: Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darrousin) is perhaps a passive-aggressive, or maybe just having a mid-life crisis.
But the drive hits some things in the way- he has a beer and a whiskey before leaving; a traffic jam gets to Antoine; he drinks again at a roadside; he and his wife bicker; he drinks again; she leaves, and once he realizes he can't catch up with her, he decides to have a night with a little more drinking ahead.
Especially with a fugitive somewhere out on the loose, as the radio says.Cedric Kahn is a skilled and trust-worthy director (via France) for a few reasons in dealing with his latest film Red Lights.
Kahn proves himself a specialist on ridiculous men lacking self-confidence and absolutely inapt to retain some dignity in a modern world like this.The thriller plot, as stated by some earlier commentators, may be a little weak, especially as regards the "man on the run" (he is obviously taken directly from the Simenon novel but his character is neither fish nor foul).
The thriller plot is merely an excuse to give a touching and disturbing portrayal of character Antoine (and his marriage).Let me answer to two of the "plot holes" discovered by two other commentators: Antoine's drinking does make sense; he drinks because of frustration and a minority complex for not feeling man enough in the presence of his successful wife.
He is not particularly likable but still makes us feel sorry for him.The ending, which I am not going to reveal here, is stirring in a very subtle way because above all it raises the question how it is all going to go on.I like stories in which weird things happen out of character logic.
Antoine Dunand (Jean-Pierre Darrousin) is an insurance company employee who may enjoy a decent salary but he feels outclassed, and is out-earned I'm sure, by his corporate attorney spouse, Helene (Carole Bouquet).
And then a bulletin announces a dangerous criminal has broken prison and is on the loose.Recognizing that Antoine is really loaded and he won't yield the car keys, Helene runs off while her husband is knocking down scotch, leaving a note that she'll take a train.Antoine is excessively upset at finding Helene missing-though befogged by booze, he also probably recognizes his own weirdness.
Setting off to intercept her train he accepts a morosely quiet hitchhiker (Vincent Deniard), a fellow who offers no name but guess who he really is (hint above).The film now enters a dark and isolated countryside where Antoine, despite his towering blood alcohol level, becomes justifiably afraid of his mostly silent young passenger.The ride becomes a trip to terror for Antoine who sobers up enough to know he better master a deteriorating and life-threatening situation.
To tell more would be to spoil an original, well-acted story about fairly ordinary people who have let their marriage grow stale for all the usually mundane reasons that presage a relationship crisis.The three main characters make "Red Lights," a title that superficially is about Antoine's reckless disregard of traffic signals but actually spotlights the warnings we receive and often ignore about impending personal crises, work.
Largely unknown outside of French cinema, all three well-experienced and effective lead actors keep the viewer glued to the screen.Compared to the current star vehicle hit, "Collateral," "Red Lights" carries forward true, outstanding noir drama by focusing on the straying from safe paths of ordinary people in common situations.
Adapted from the 1953 novel by Georges Simenon and set to Debussy's elegantly creepy Nuages, writer-director Cedric Kahn offers up movie with attributes of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller.The feeling of foreboding begins immediately when we meet Antoine Dunant (Jean-Pierre Darroussin a low-level insurance executive.
They are planning to drive to the countryside from Paris to pick up their kids from summer camp.But as soon as Antoine gets to the café he guzzles three beers back to back with one eye on the street lest his wife arrive before he's suitably fortified.
He leaves Helene angrily waiting in the car while he goes into yet another bar, to prepare himself for the long night ahead.Hélène, freaked by his increasing belligerence and inability to drive in a straight line, abandons her husband to look for a train station.
And as Antoine embarks on a desperate journey to track his wife down, it soon becomes clear that Red Lights is really showing us a portrait of a marriage, a marriage that has been enigmatically hanging by a thread.Their need to see the children again is probably just a way of distracting them from the aridness of their relationship.
But when the sun finally rises, and Antoine is released from his drunken hell, Kahn does provide a dash of hope for the couple.In the end, Red Lights is showing that relationships are frail and that the machinations of marriage are often inexplicable.
"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.
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.
It feels like slow-moving imitation Clouzot, with elements from Les Diaboliques ("What really happened?"), The Wages of Fear (high tension on a long drive), and Quai des Orfevres (a similar plot point I don't want to reveal here).With tighter editing, "Feux rouges" could have been a much stronger movie.
French screenwriter and director Cédric Kahn's fifth feature film which he co-wrote with screenwriter and director Gilles Marchand and screenwriter and director Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, is an adaptation of a novel from 1953 by Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989) which was shot in Paris, France.
It tells the story about Antoine and Helene, a married middle-aged couple who lives in Paris, France.
On a very hot day, Antoine and Helene heads of towards the south of France to pick up their children before going on vacation, but when the heat and the traffic begins to agitate them they turn on each other.This thoroughly written and stylistically and precisely directed French production is a character-driven, well-paced and dark fictional tale about a seemingly happy married couple who begins to criticize one another while on a long drive on a French highway.
Functioning both as a psychological thriller and a road-movie and with a reinforcing narrative structure and instrumental score, this suspenseful drama draws an internal study of character with naturalistic milieu depictions about a man who one day becomes more and more aggravated, convincing himself that he is being patronized and suppressed, and takes it out on his wife.Cédric Khan's throughout engrossing independent film is marked by French cinematographer Patrick Blossier's fine cinematography, the effectively foreboding atmosphere and the engaging and commendable acting performances by French actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin and French actress Carole Bouquet.
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.
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.
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..
I was not as interested as the director in the relationship between the high flying wife and the husband who sees himself as her poodle and presumably this is why I found the ending simplistic and verging on the insulting, but never mind a good ride up to then!.
As we were leaving the theatre a man sitting in front of us shook his head and said, "All that for WHAT?!" A lot of plot development that led nowhere, unnecessary red herrings, completely unbelievable dialogue (especially in interrogation scenes), and entirely unlikeable main character (although his acting was, admittedly, terrific).
Feux rouges is a great thriller in the style of Hitchcock.Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and Hélène (Carole Bouquet) play husband an wife who bicker with each other on a road trip to pick up their children from Summer camp.
It makes you really think about marriage.They split up, with one taking the train, and both come in contact with an escaped convict (Vincent Deniard, in his first film).
over half the film features Darroussin, the protagonist schlemiel(sp.?) in a preposterous scenario where he is a man who only has a drink 2 or 3 times a year, but, in the course of this film, drinks enough to put ray milland to sleep in a heartbeat ,all the while driving, AWAKE, long distances and managing to carry out an extremely brutal act of violence.
***SPOILERS*** Driving out to see their two children spending the summer in camp in Southern France Antonie & Helene Dunan, Jean-Pierre Darroussir & Carole Bonquet, get on each others nerves.
This gets him miles off the road to Boaedaux where his and Helene's children are at summer camp.The last straw for Helene is when Antoine again stops at a bar nightclub and gets caught up with the action and drinking.
Antoine finds an escaped murderer and even worse he almost ends up becoming one of his victims.Well directed written and acted French Film-Noir melodrama that has you wondering like Antoine if your dreaming or if whats happening, or happened, to you is real or not.
Antoine doesn't really know if the injured woman is Helene or not until almost the end of the movie.
This bit of startling information brought Antoine back to reality since he thought that what happened to him the night before was all some nightmare that he had while he was dead drunk alone lying in his car."Feux Rouges" is a movie that you have to really stay with and not get too irritated with it's very slow pace and lack of dialog.
The second half of the film where Antonie is out trying to find his wife Helene has the added suspense to what exactly happened to him the evening before.
Bouquet and Darroussin are a couple in a crisis and Darroussin is becoming crazy because of the lack of love from his wife and on the road to Bordeaux going pick-up their children they have an argument and Bouquet leaves him and disappears.This is the kind of movie that's the reason of the bad reputation of actual overal french movies.
In the beginning I had the impression of watching the kind of movie of filmmakers that just finished a filmschool: academic directing, actors over-acting (especially bouquet), bad setting of the relationship between the couple bouquet-Darroussin.
That's because although FEUX ROUGES starts off slow and the characters seem unlikable, the film builds and builds to a wonderful crescendo--making this a film well worth seeking.A middle-aged couple (Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Carole Bouquet) are preparing to drive from Paris to the countryside to pick up their two children at summer camp.
During this portion of the film, the viewer will probably notice several things--the couple lacks warmth in their relationship, they are hard to get to know for the audience and perhaps the husband has a drinking problem.
It all gets worse when several times the husband stops the car at bars "to go to the bathroom"--and he takes a couple drinks instead.
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!.
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..
Helene (Carole Bouquet) is beautiful and intelligent and is a hit at the law firm where she works, but her husband Antoine (Jean Pierre Darroussin) is less successful and attractive, leaving him with feelings of impotency which he deals with by drinking.
The director does manage to build up tension, and the first half of the film is gripping as we search for the answers for Antoine's drinking and sympathise with his plight as he is continuously kept waiting by his wife.
The film continues to irritate when Antoine realises that the hitchhiker is a wanted killer, but looks up to him because he is a "real man" and does not bow down to anyone.
The camera spends a lot of time on close-ups, especially on Jean-Pierre Darroussin (of Marseilles movies fame), who plays Antoine.
But even if you were too put all expectations aside, I'm sure you would find a film with a solid idea, great acting, and some very suspenseful sequences, but also a film filled with plot holes and an unsatisfying ending.The film begins with a French couple going on a car ride to pick up their kids.
The man Antoine (superbly acted by an actor I can't remember)has been drinking and during their trip he and his wife Helene (also great, but does not have as much screen time) bicker about how Antoine is not treated like a man.
Antoine takes the keys and goes out for a drink, but his wife is gone, leaving him a note that she has taken the train.
And when you do reach the conclusion (if you bother to analyze at all), its not really a message that stays with you."Red Lights" is a nice diversion with great acting and some good suspense, but one can't look at a movie in pieces.
To do more than sketch the barest of plot outlines - Darroussin and Bouqet, a much-married couple, set out to drive to Bordeaux and collect their children from camp; he drinks, she nags, powders at a truck stop, he picks up a hitcher and guess what - would be to stray into spoiler territory.