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Two French cinema motifs — traffic jams and anonymous sex — come together in Claire Denis’s oddly bloodless film. It’s on the title evening that Laure (Valérie Lemercier) must finish packing up her belongings so she can move into her boyfriend’s apartment ("Our place," she has to repeat to herself) the next morning. Embodying her not-so-unconscious resistance to this plan is the transit strike that paralyzes Paris, turning her attempt to drive to a friend’s place for dinner into a reprise of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. This stoppage results not in revolutionary violence but in meaningless lovemaking as a rugged stranger (Vincent Lindon) climbs into her Peugeot and . . . Although the concept (based on a novel by François Ozon’s collaborator, Emmanuéle Bernheim) sounds sexy, Denis indulges in the imitative fallacy, and the narrative moves at a traffic-jam pace, in stops and starts and with languorous montages of reflective lap dissolves and superimposed images that are like the dull reveries of a motorist ODing on carbon monoxide. In Denis’s previous two films, Beau travail and Trouble Every Day, her obliquity evoked enigmatic beauty and uneasiness; here it just makes you want to jump out of the car and ask for directions. In French with English subtitles. (90 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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