Red Lights

Starring:Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Charline Paul, Jean-Pierre Gos, Sava Lolov, Igor Skreblin, Carole Plessis, AndrÃ© Bernard, Yves Michel, Vincent Monmousseau, Thomas Germaine, HervÃ© LassÃ¯nce, AgnÃ¨s Akopian, Patrick Servoin, Dominique Charmet, Lara Al-Jammal, Franck Bigot, Philippe Ivancic, Edith Lachaux
Director: CÃ©dric Kahn
Studio: Fox Lorber
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

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

Description

2004 Nominee Independent Spirit Award - Best Foreign Fim. It's a summer holiday weekend in Paris. Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a timid insurance salesman, and his lawyer wife Hélène (Carole Bouquet) are off to the south of France to pick up their children from camp. They begin 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), Cédric Kahn's (L'Ennui, Roberto Succo) edge-of-your-seat thriller masterfully evokes the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol.

Customer Reviews:

one wild vacation.......2007-02-17

the French certainly have a special niche for offbeat suspense thrillers.. From clouzot to the french noir of the new wave to the modern high class hitchcock like flicks that grace festival after festival..
'Red lights' is certainly one of the top of the heap - it has the most gripping, edgy, unsettling feeling to it.. You feel like you are on the edge of a cliff about into fall into an unfathomable abyss.. This is a film which taunts you on the most direct psycological levels.. The story is of a man who is at his wits end - who is tired of following the straight and narrow train like path of daily existence.. He wants to find a sort of freedom.. and he does.. but the results, of course, are not quite what one would expect.. This is a very intoxicating movie with an excellent acting performance.. It is a great example of French suspense- but at the same time it is unique - i've never seen anything quite like it.

Warmed-over Clouzot.......2007-01-18

A decent but ultimately disappointing thriller. 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. It does contain a number of memorable scenes, especially those involving the protagonist and his second passenger. Not a bad film at all, but it doesn't deserve the rave reviews it has drawn from several major critics.

Unsettling road trip thriller from France.......2006-11-11

Based on a novel by "Maigret" author Georges Simenon, "Red Lights" is both a moody and tense psychological thriller--and the study of a marriage under pressure--set within the claustrophobic confines of a car trip.

Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is a quiet and somewhat nondescript insurance salesman married to Helene (Carole Bouquet), a partner at a high-powered law firm. Antoine's rather meek and passive demeanor belies the smoldering resentments he harbors towards his more successful wife. Leaving to pick up their children from summer camp, Helene is both confused and irritated when Antoine insists upon stopping at various bars along the highway for a drink. The mask of a cordial and accommodating husband soon slips away as Antoine begins to veer from petulant and sulking to openly antagonistic. Antoine's alcohol consumption also leads to his increasingly erratic driving. When he refuses to let his wife drive, the couple's squabbling escalates until it reaches a point where Helene threatens to continue the trip without him. Defiantly stopping at yet another bar, Antoine confiscates the keys and leaves a furious Helene in the car to await his pleasure. Upon his return, Helene is gone.

The mystery behind Helene's disappearance and Antoine's strange alcohol-fueled journey without her lies at the heart of this low key thriller. "Red Lights" is a perplexing and enigmatic character study of a man who has let his frustrations over his less than fulfilling and somewhat unremarkable life disastrously cloud his judgment. At one point, he picks up a brooding hitchhiker who may well be a fugitive and attempts to forge an insane camaraderie with him.

Various television new reports covering the search for the escaped convict and the mounting holiday highway death toll fuels the film's growing sense of dread and uncertainty. Hypnotic ribbons of highway--and the red neon lights of the bars which seem to almost float in the nighttime sky--gives the film an almost dreamlike quality at times. However, the glue that really holds this film together is Darrousin's performance. He manages to make Antoine a very flawed and human protagonist, eliciting our anger at his terrible behavior and our fear for him at his poor choices and their terrifying consequences. Although inexcusable, Antoine's childish 'acting out' with Helene emanates from his feelings of jealousy and insecurity at being married to a beautiful and more accomplished woman. Darrousin's subtle body language and his sad, hangdog expression speak volumes. Antoine is truly one of Thoreau's `men who lead lives of quiet desperation.'

"Red Lights" cannot really be described as a high octane thriller. Rather, it is one that builds slowly--in stages--and is dependent on mood and tone. However, your patience will be rewarded with a rich and complicated story full of twists and turns. In French with English subtitles.

RED LIGHTS is a Red Herring.......2006-11-10

First, let me say that I derive no enjoyment from shellacking this movie; in fact, I was looking forward to watching it. But despite having the excellent pedigree of a Georges Simenon novel, FEUX ROUGES is both ludicrously bad and laughably overpraised. The treatment of the story's themes (paranoia, marital resentments, frustrated masculinity) is hamhanded and repetitious.

Ostensibly a thriller/mystery, RED LIGHTS went irrevocably on the blink when a police checkpoint (set up to catch an escaped killer!) waves our protagonist, Antoine, on through... despite the fact that the large criminal is seated right next to him! Okay, so the plot's bogus; what about the characters? Uninteresting and exasperating. But it's a French movie; is it beautifully filmed? Yeah, for the first 10 minutes, and from then on, the settings are either dark or unimpressive, so there's nothing for the eye to linger on.

SPOILER ALERT: Just kidding. I can't ruin any surprises; by the time you see how this story ends, you'll see the only surprise is how cheesily coincidental and jarringly sentimental the wrap-up is.

Road Kill.......2006-09-12

If I wanted to watch 2 hours of road ahead of a car then I'd get out and drive somewhere nice instead..

A particularly tedious effort.. by the time any "drama" occured I was too hypnotized by the road to pay any attention. There is also an awful american style (and thus telegraphed) horror moment thrown in to truly condemn the film. Having a huge collection of world movies I am not easily bored! but this managed it!

Sometimes when it looks as though nothing is really happening in a movie it really is because nothing is happening! Just because its French does not excuse it... Such a mundane thing as a bad marriage is totally unable to conjure up any tension in this manner.

In terms of style, a far superior film "The Son" builds up slowly and the meaning/enjoyment of the movie is consummated in the final moment. Red Lights by comparison was truly unrewarding...

Average customer rating:

Red Lights Ahead
Starring: Andy Clyde , Lucile Gleason , Paula Stone , Roger Imhof , and Frank Coghlan Jr.
Director: Roland D. Reed
Manufacturer: Alpha Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Release Date: 2006-04-25

Red Lights (Feux rouges) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - Australia ]

Average customer rating:

Red Lights (Feux rouges) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - Australia ]
Director: Cédric Kahn
Manufacturer: AV Channel
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000GHUQQU

Product Description

Australia released, PAL/Region 0 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. LANGUAGES: French (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (Subtitles), ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN (1.85:1), SYNOPSIS: This brilliant, sinister French thriller is a twisty road movie in which every sign points toward catastrophe. As night falls during the journey of an unhappily married couple from Paris to Bordeaux, the clogged highway takes them into descending levels of psychosexual hell. Jean-Pierre Darroussin's Antoine is a mousy, balding insurance salesman who hates his job, and resents his more successful wife, a sleek corporate lawyer. The movie is a study of male passive-aggression that comes up with a malicious Hemingway-esque solution to Antoine's masculinity crisis. When his wife, fed up with his drinking on the road, deserts him to take the train, he picks up a hitchhiker he knows might be a dangerous escaped convict, and courts the redemptive (and grisly) male rite of passage he's been seeking. Following Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" and Claire Denis's "Friday Night," "Red Lights" uses the traffic jam as a potent screen metaphor for something bigger. SPECIAL FEATURES: Trailer(s), Interactive Menu, Cast/Crew Interview(s),

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