Ray Pride

What amount of tingle and touch can lead to a smile of sublime satisfaction?

Claire Denis, bless her French heart, is willing to slow narrative down to gesture, gesture that indicates impulse a character is only starting to perceive. I love her "Beau Travail"(1999), a lyrical study of contemporary French Legionaries going through the motions of past notions of masculinity. Her most recent, "Trouble Every Day" (2001), is a luminous botch, a Paris-set vampire story (you have to guess) which is very, very bad, yet formally luscious in its framing, almost pretentiously elliptical editing and its creamy design and lighting. Like many of Denis' movies, it's impassioned yet serenely, almost impossibly cool in tone.

With "Friday Night" (Vendredi soir), Denis works again with cinematographer Agnes Godard, editor Nelly Quettier and composer Dickon Hinchliffe (of Tindersticks, which scored "Trouble Every Day," "Nenette et Boni"). Laure (Valerie Lemercier) is a fortyish Parisienne whose evening begins as she locks the door of the flat she's just locked up for the last time. She's packed. Essentially homeless. She's moving in the next day with her boyfriend. The city's stalled, too, snarled by a transit strike. Laure is a heartbeat from falling asleep, stilled, car's heater hot, a flutter of the eye and her life could turn dream. Or Jean (Vincent Landon), a total stranger, could let himself into her passenger side, a man who carries himself with weary cool, ask for a light, come into her life.

The film is dedicated "To Nan," and as the story progresses in its quiet, unexplained fashion, one realizes the film is not only a tribute to gesture, hesitation, unsentimental desire, but also to photographer Nan Goldin. Lemercier somewhat resembles her, and Goldin's autobiographical work often takes place in weathered interiors with features similar to those in Denis' film, such as faded wallpaper, nubby chenille, lamplight that pools quieter than streetlight. There's almost no language. Two experienced, solitary people meet. They exchange their presence, but not their stories. Not foolish words. A few words spoken atop raw emotions, based on the novel by co-writer Emmanuele Bernheim. In the press notes, Bernheim captures her project, but also Denis' clear-eyed, unsentimental command of this night that could as easily be taking place in one of Laure's eye-flutters as in the confines of the sweetly shabby hotel they find themselves walking toward. They offer, they give, but they do not consume. They move toward an image that closes the film, a grownup, satiated version of the final shot of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows."

"I wrote from the woman's point of view," Bernheim writes, "I tried to describe a primitive impulse, a sort of urge that has nothing to do with any ideas of bourgeois adultery. It's not because she had decided to move in with her boyfriend the next day that all this happens on that particular evening. It's sort of irrepressible, almost animal urge that has nothing sentimental about it. It lacks the alibi of sentiment and yet it's something fairly pure. There's this man's smell, and nothing counts anymore."

A different sort of smell has been the reviews of a new CD, Liz Phair's self-titled release, and I'd decided to wait to pick it up. In Sunday's Sun-Times, columnist Lloyd Sachs wrote of the best pieces of meta-criticism I've read in weeks, cutting to the core of many complaints I have about career critics as well as the meta-meta-crit hall-of-mirrors stalked by many Internet columnists.

"The surest sign that an album is worthy is the sound of critics piling on. If an album gets everyone in a dither, it has to have something going for it--if not in the grooves, then in the attitude," Sachs writes. There was enough reflect to get me to buy the album. "The pop fan in pop critics suffers from a certain gullibility in believing that artists are there to serve only them, that they are duty bound to toe the line and stay within the realm of the music that has earned them an audience," he writes, and the critiques of both "Trouble Every Day" and "Friday Night" have shown similar impatience. Hasn't she done this before, goes the whine? I wonder when I read such plaints: can't you see the grain in the corners of that hotel room, the light off a pinball machine on a young girl's face in a bistro, the erratic grain of Phair's voice? In a song called "Rock Me," her sexual paean is to a man a decade her junior. "I bet you a cigarette you won't regret my timmmmmme," she sings, not quite hitting the note. I love the texture of her voice, my ear isolating the production pile-on of The Matrix. "I want to play Xbox on your floor/say hi to your roommate who's next door," she strains, and the simplicity of the story, along with the imperfect voice, makes me happy. Even when she launches into a bit of self-parody, assuming a younger soul should have a record collection that includes her desire to be a "blowjob queen" who will "fuck and run," that "Your record collection don't exist/you don't even know who Liz Phair is," the charm lies in the yodeling elongation of her own name, not for its self-consciousness but the layers of consciousness in the notes of her imperfect voice.

It's strange when critics assume a work isn't on purpose. A female friend obsessing over a new Blur song to me blew up at the mention of "Liz Phair": yes, she'd been disappointed, it sounded like radio, it wasn't the privileged but forlorn Wicker Park bar bopper singing anymore: I didn't press the point. Even with a stolid gesso of production stratagems pounding through many of the songs, I hear the voice, its grain, its flaws, its human failings. It's a lot like Denis' project, to trade plot for the coolly experiential. A tincture of sexism seems to rise up against certain work, but it's good to assume artists like Denis and Phair know every goddamn thing they're up to, just like male artists, even when the strain leads to flameout. Girls just wanna not be judged.

"Friday Night" opens that day at the Music Box; "Liz Phair" is already on sale.

(2003-07-16)

Also by Ray Pride

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Mark Moskowitz has spent twenty years making political campaign commercials. In his first feature, "Stone Reader," he's on-camera as much as anyone.
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"Pirates" is one of the most outrageous, goofy, giddy, hilarious juggling acts I've witnessed in a movie theater in a long, long time.
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Tip of the Week
Mohsen Makhmalbaf's gorgeous, surreal but all-too-real "Kandahar" tells the story of an Afghan woman's return to her homeland with the Taliban still in power.
(2003-07-02)

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A bigger splash
(2003-07-02)

Short Runs
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Smells like green spirit
(2003-06-25)

Out of the Past
(2003-06-25)

Short Runs
(2003-06-18)

Fille fatale
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Meta fear
(2003-06-18)

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