I've been known to do things in the wrong order. Cart before the horse? That's me. It's not always a bad thing, though. Like watching Vendredi Soir (Friday Night) by Claire Denis before watching the trailer in the extras. The film is about a woman who meets a man one evening and finds a deep connection over the course of ten hours or so. One third of the film takes place in a car stuck in Parisian traffic. Another third of the film takes place in the streets of Paris, in a restaurant, and in a cafe, and another third in a hotel room where people who hook up do what people do in a hotel room. But this hook up might just alter the woman's life. For the most part, the score, by Dickon Hinchliffe (Tindersticks), is bitter-sweet, delicate, and intimate, as is the whole film. It's a beautiful work that requires a little patience. That first third, the sitting in a car in traffic part, it really feels like you're sitting in a car in traffic. It's claustrophobic and slow and I was tempted to opt out of the film. But I stuck with it and it pays off when Denis takes us out of that car. Outside the car the couple goes through the stages of a 50 year relationship in sixty minutes of screen time. And the last shot of our heroine is unforgettable. (Sure, it borrows from The 400 Blows, but so what?)
The trailer? In two minutes it manages to misrepresent and subvert a beautiful 90-minute film. Whoever is in charge of these things decided they wanted you to think Vendredi Soir is a French remake of Fatal Attraction. Images from the film are completely out of context, not uncommon and I understand it--a trailer's job is to make you want to see the film, but at what cost? In this case, instead of telling me this is a unique and dramatic love story featuring a very empowered heroine (there's an audience for that, right?), the trailer is cut to make her seem like a homely victim (and there's an audience for that, too, I'm sure). But presumably this trailer was shown before a sophisticated drama, not a thriller, so whom is such a misrepresentation serving? Back to the trailer. They use a snippet of Hinchliffe's music in the beginning, the more ambient stuff, but then the Shostakovich is cued--Symphonie de Chambre, opus 110a--a piece that was obviously on Bernard Hermann's mind when he was composing the music for Psycho. The images are cut together to suggest she's in peril--he drives like a lunatic, his hands pull down her underwear, he pins her against a wall as they kiss. The last shot of the couple, that kiss, combined with the frenetic music, more than suggests the heroine is about to get raped. It's quite different from the last shot of the actual film, I dare say.
[Ed. note: for a related post, see Trailer-Movie Disconnect]
