For the audience enamored of Claire Denis’s polarizing lover letter to a medium she so gracefully commands, there simply wasn’t another film in 2003 on par with this piece of entrancing, visceral cinema. A poised panegyric in electric images born of the senses, Denis and dp Agnes Godard weave a sinuous, dreamy consideration of a one night stand replete with the unspoken punctuation this is human chemistry. It’s a film that measures the weight of a calm hand on a nervous one, the size of a fleeting glance, a gentle touch and its role amidst the imponderable power plays of sexual vulnerability. Conversations are curt, silences are profoundly pregnant, and the resulting cinema is of the finest variety: elegant, restrained, nearly pure.

But there were those who fell for Friday Night and those who fell asleep. For many, the film seemed little more than a stylish glorification of a tryst. The pared-to-the-bone narrative received its share of critical calumny, but frankly, Denis chose unlikable subject matter. Further entrenching the film in self-imposed misfortune, Friday Night’s profundities seem less suited to intellectual appropriation than to some subliminal emotional recognition; even if you respond to the film, it’s tough to gauge why and even harder to write about. Suffice it to say that hers is a movie meant to be felt, not watched, for dreamers rather than voyeurs. And though the onscreen romance drives the narrative, the real love affair is strangely cinephilic: between a filmmaker, her audience, and those glorious images that connect the two just above the belt.
—MATTHEW PLOUFFE