Cars: A Micro-analysis of Space and Bodies in Vendredi soir

Abstract

While the car traditionally appears as male domain, the haptic aesthetic and poetic forms of Claire Denis’ film Vendredi soir (2002) disconnect cars from masculine power. Through a micro-analysis of the film’s forms, spaces, and bodies, the chapter shows how the film suspends the gendered relationships at play in public and private spaces. In this chapter, Ceuterick emphasises the affirmative aesthetic of the film, which transforms the car into a home, gendered bodies into lived bodies, and intimacy into a passage between real and imaginary.

I describe the imagination as something more than a kind of individual faculty, and something other than a mechanism for escaping the real. It’s actually a collective tool for the transformation of the real, for the creation of multiple horizons of possibility.

(Arjun Appadurai 2002, 34)

In an interview on his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,Arjun Appadurai explains that a ‘locality’ is as much a structure of feeling as a tangible construction. Imagination plays a central role in the making of a locality and of social changes; the imagination of artists, architects, urban planners, geographers, and social scientists all participate in the making of space as a structure of feeling (in Raymond Williams’ words). Appadurai’s emphasis on imagination as a social practice resonates through this chapter’s analysis of Claire Denis’ film Vendredi soir (2002), which illustrates how imagination takes urban space beyond gendered and power relations.

In the previous chapter, we saw how patriarchal cultures negatively affect women’s freedom of movement.¹ Jeanne and Marie, the protagonists in the road movie Messidor, react to the constraints upon their mobility with wilfulness. In turn, such wilfulness changes the way they inhabit social spaces. Messidor portrays its women characters as wilfully—albeit with difficulties—inhabiting the public sphere as their male counterparts do. These women wish to benefit from the ‘democratic “right” … to disrupt public space … and to undermine proper politics’ (Sheller and Urry 2000, 741). My analysis of Messidor demonstrates that Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s definition of mobility as a ‘democratic right’ does not apply to women.² Women are denied access to the public sphere that Habermas describes as ‘a sphere of personal freedom, leisure, and freedom of movement’ (Habermas 1989 [1962], 129). By contrast, in Messidor, Jeanne and Marie’s lack of a car and money, coupled with their representation as ‘dangerous women’, leads to immobility: they cannot undertake the same journey of self-discovery as their male counterparts.

In this chapter I argue that Denis’ subversion of the road movie genre in Vendredi soir modifies the patriarchal structures of social spaces (so-called ‘public’ spaces) and the concept of mobility by bringing Paris to a standstill. The stalling of ‘traffic’ reduces both men and women to a state of immobility. In this exceptional static state (or crisis of mobility), the commonly gendered narrative of mobility is suspended or rendered valueless. We shall see how, for example, the car that is ordinarily an index of ‘masculine’ power within the logic of mobility transforms into a space in need of re-appropriation and re-definition. Although the car reproduces current inequalities of class, race, and gender, Sheller and Urry note that the automobile participates in the ‘great transformation of modern civil societies’, ‘collapsing the distinction between what is private and what is public’ and putting auto-mobility at the core of civic and political existence in cities (2000, 741). Vendredi Soir, therefore, proposes a situation in which space is open to new relations of gender and power.

Claire Denis challenges the idea that the road quester finds a space for oneself through his or her mobility and assimilates it instead to the ‘domestication’ of space. If Vendredi soir echoes Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) in the absurd immobility and strangeness of human contacts, the cars stuck in traffic do not epitomise the purposelessness and meaninglessness of human existence. On the contrary, Denis’ camera affirmatively converts the modern apocalyptic imaginary about immobilised cars into an opportunity for embracing one’s desires and transforming the power-geometries of space.

Several recent filmic examples also convert the car into a space of dwelling whose ‘inhabitants’ somehow challenge gender binaries, such as Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch 1991), No Sex Last Night (Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard 1996), Crash (David Cronenberg 1996), Ten (Abbas Kiarostami 2002), Lluvia (Paula Hernández 2008), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt 2008), Drive (Nicholas Refn 2011), and Locke (Steven Knight 2013). In Vendredi Soir, the car becomes a ‘poetic’ vehicle—a medium of poiesis, or else ‘story-making’, in which intimacy and connections are generated. Domesticating space emerges as inhabiting space through one’s senses, through a body that affects and is affected.

Laure, the female protagonist of Vendredi soir, fully inhabits space through bodily sensations and affects. This is evinced through the aesthetic representation of the spaces she traverses as fluid, as space-times. She constructs spaces of intimacy for herself through a wilful, desiring body and through objects that expand her intimacy (echoing Bachelard’s words). In Denis’ film, Laure fully inhabits three spaces: her apartment, her car, and a motel room. If these spaces are embedded within gendered sociocultural norms and thus restrict the protagonist’s fully embodied and empowered habitation, in the film the very same spaces also appear aesthetically as spaces of intimacy in continual transformation. This chapter analyses how Laure’s habitation of these three spaces blur the boundaries that make up the binaries of mobility/immobility, subjective/objective reality, and male/female.

In Vendredi soir, the car expands Laure’s intimacy beyond the domesticity of the house. In particular, the car and the motel room allow her to affirmatively rewrite her habitation of space as a subject of desire rather than as a gendered subject. When the film begins, Laure (interpreted by the famous French actress Valérie Lemercier) is packing up boxes: she is moving, we find out, to her (male) partner’s house the following morning. In short, she is leaving her apartment, her own affective space, to live with her partner in his apartment, which she has not yet learned to call ‘home’. She washes her hair in the bathroom and then drives to her friend Marie’s house for dinner. As soon as she leaves her street, Laure is caught in a gigantic traffic jam, due to a public-transport strike that has blocked the roads of the entire city of Paris. Shivering pedestrians bundled up in winter jackets overrun the pathways and swarm onto the road in between motionless cars, while a woman’s voice on the radio suggests drivers should welcome cold, stranded pedestrians into the warm safety of their cars.

While Laure’s car is stuck in traffic, a man, Jean, gets in (played by another star of French cinema, Vincent Lindon). As Laure starts feeling desire for him, she steps out of the car to call Marie and cancel their dinner. When she returns to her car, Jean has taken the wheel and magically manoeuvres through the traffic jam. Laure panics and asks him to stop the car and get out, but soon after looks for him, until she finds him in a café. They then go to a motel where they have sex, and have dinner at an Italian restaurant, along with several other couples who are also stranded. They spend the night together in the motel room, and very early in the morning, while Jean is still asleep, Laure leaves the room and runs onto the street with a smile on her face.

This chapter explores three key spaces: the apartment, the car, and the motel. In spite of her gendered ‘situation’, Laure fully inhabits each space through a lived body, a body of sensations. I argue that the interweaving of representational, haptic, and magical-realist elements in the film contributes to the film’s affirmative and affective aesthetic, which I explore through Laure’s habitation of space. On the one hand, the film portrays houses, cars, streets, and social spaces as ‘[housings] of gender’ (Bruno 2002, 86), informed by heteronormative patriarchal norms. By focusing on Laure’s move from her own apartment to her (male) partner’s apartment, the film places emphasis on the gendered power relations of the household. On the other hand, Massey argues that any place—the household, the workplace, the street—is an ‘ever-shifting geometry of social/power relations’ (1994, 4). Laure rediscovers her spatial environment through bodily sensations and affective relations, and she extends her spacesof intimacy—and her power—into other spaces, namely her car and a motel room. The textures of the film and its focus on Laure’s sense of touch create haptic spaces marked by affects and sensations. Whereas diegetic elements of the film constantly threaten to reposition the woman protagonist within gendered discourses, the haptic conveys the character’s embodiment of space and spaces as ever-changing space-times. In a first instance, Laure is made to feel out of place, and moves through Paris with the fear of violence. However, when a giant traffic jam immobilises the whole city, micro-relations between bodies and space on screen give mobility another signification that is playful, affirmative, and goes beyond gender.

While films may produce and reinforce social and spatial dichotomies, Denis’ haptic aesthetic contributes to dismantling them. I refer to haptic aesthetic as textures of images and sounds that create spaces of affects and sensations. Following the work of Laura U. Marks, Vivian Sobchack, and Jennifer Barker, I argue that by creating a ‘habitable world’ (in Sobchack’s words, 2004, 151) emphasising the lived, textural, and affective dimensions of space, the film invites the viewers to touch and experience what is being shown. As Marks writes in The Skin of Film ‘haptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in the image rather than coming to the image already knowing what it is’ (2000, 178). The haptic aesthetic of Vendredi soir functions as a political strategy that takes viewers beyond what they already know of gender, mobility, and the domestic space. More than solely through physical sensations or visceral affects, the film impacts on the viewer’s affect in its sociocultural dimension. Laura U. Marks notes that ‘perception is already informed by culture, and so even illegible images are (cultural) perceptions, not raw sensations’ (145):

embodied responses to cinema vary not only individually but also collectively. The cinematic encounter takes place not only between my body and the film’s body, but my sensorium and the film’s sensorium. We bring our own personal and cultural organisation of the senses to cinema, and cinema brings a particular organisation of the senses to us. (Marks 2000, 153)

Similarly, in her book Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression,Martine Beugnet studies the haptic images of Vendredi soir. She examines how films ‘affect us viscerally as well as intellectually’ and investigates how film can be approached as a ‘form of embodied thinking’ (2007, 7, 8). The embodied thinking that cinema offers also comes through in Jennifer Barker’s description of the haptic, which particularly resonates within Claire Denis’ film:

[The haptic] is a clever kind of political activism, in that it invites us not only to consider from a distance the film’s feminist celebration of female desire but also, and more important, to partake in it, to experience this desire for ourselves in the act of watching the film. The power of the film’s feminist political statement is thus not merely rhetorical, but profoundly tactile. (2009, 24)

Beugnet expands on Steven Shaviro’s (2004) study of cinematic affect to explore film as ‘primarily material, sensory phenomena’ (2007, 11). She adds that insisting on affect does not mean cutting off all processes of critical analysis. On the contrary, a focus on affect complements the analysis of film as ‘narrative process, system of representation, or articulation of an ideological discourse’ (Beugnet, 11; 14). As explained in the introductory chapter, I understand affect as having forms on screen instead of being sensations transmitted to the spectator. Rather than focusing on what the spectator feels or lives through while experiencing the film as Sobchack or Barker do, I wish to concentrate on the textures, objects, and rhythms that make up the cinematic spaces of Vendredi soir and give form to a haptic form of political activism. The film is well-suited for a micro-analysis: looking at the micro-movements of bodies and the ‘scratches’ of the screen’s surface, and examining how the film ‘breathes’ (in Barker’s words, 2009, 3)³ and creates rhythm, while also considering the characters’ habitation of diegetic spaces (houses, cars, streets, and hotel rooms).

Vendredi soir creates a tension between haptic and representational images, through which ‘passages’ of affects take place, from the patriarchal discourses that negatively affect the female protagonist’s spatialities to her desiring body wilfully inhabiting space. On screen, such transformations are especially visible through thresholds, liminal spaces, and the magical realism of the film. Just as in Head-On and Wadjda, liminal spaces, in particular windows, function as thresholds between spaces of intimacy and outside spaces. In Vendredi soir, the affirmative transformation of space occurs in the passage between the film’s realist elements, which convey the negative effects of navigating ‘patriarchal spaces’, and the haptic and ‘magical’ images that activate an affirmative imaginary of spatial habitation beyond gender norms.

Windows, Wandering Camera, and Magical Realism

Laure’s dwelling (in her apartment, car, and the motel room) questions the power-geometries and the gendered norms that determine the habitation of space. The first space appearing on screen, Laure’s apartment, aesthetically conveys her heteronormative situation: she is moving into her (male) partner’s apartment. For Laure, her apartment is a space of intimacy. Three aspects in the apartment sequence highlight the film’s affirmative aesthetic: the cinematography, the sound, and the mise-en-scène and objects filmed. Each aspect helps to show space as complex and in continual transformation rather than fixed, unchangeable, or ‘stuck’ in gendered sociocultural discourse. These aspects contribute to the tension between representing ‘home’ as the ‘housing of gender’ (in the words of Giuliana Bruno 2002, 86)—that is, Laure’s potential containment in a seemingly fixed sociocultural situation (moving in with her partner)—and haptically evoking the affirmative transformation of negative sensations into the embodiment of space as possibility, unfolding in the present through Laure’s sensations.

As we will see in the analysis of Head-On, the window in Vendredi soir appears throughout the film as a trope of containment, but also of spatial transformation and imaginary possibilities. A series of static long shots of the roofs of Paris opens the film. First, the shots show roofs visible from Laure’s windows, and then, as the sun sets and the city sinks deeper into the night, the camera wanders further and shows some of the city’s iconic monuments, such as the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre, likely not visible from Laure’s apartment. While these images establish the diegetic environment of the film, they also disturb its temporality and narrative point of view, through the use of a ‘wandering camera’ (which we will discuss later). When the camera returns to Laure’s apartment, the light coming from outside of her window suggests that it is in fact an earlier stage of the day than in the previous images. The magical and lyrical chords, scored by Dickon Hinchliffe, that resonate during these establishing shots point to the film’s forthcoming magical realism and the possibilities offered by the imaginary (and also establishes the film itself as an imaginary space). When the camera enters the apartment and films Laure while she packs and looks out of the window at the surrounding rooftops, the music takes a dissonant turn and becomes more complex, richer, and sombre.

The soundtrack of the opening sequence creates an affective atmosphere, in between intimacy, nostalgia, and insecurity. Squeaking sounds of Laure’s permanent marker and packing tape interrupt the non-diegetic, sombre music and give affective texture to the space that Laure is leaving, thereby reinforcing the distress that the music conveys. When Laure looks out of the window and admires the view one last time, the soundtrack changes to a more peaceful classical score—which will become a recurrent leitmotiv of Laure and Jean’s intimate encounter. The magical-sounding score that resonates again and the point-of-view shots of lit windows that pierce the darkness of the night confer intimate and fanciful affects, and point to the multiple possibilities of people’s lives in the comfort of their apartment.

Magical realism becomes a way to express the many possibilities of the real, including Laure’s rewriting of her habitation of the apartment with her partner, possibly outside of the rules of gendered living. As will become clear, the blending between narrative elements and Laure’s lived sensations affectively conveys spatial imaginary. The intense focus on textures, the soundtrack, and the cinematography lead the viewer into an imaginary world. Departing from Laure’s apartment window, the camera ‘wanders’ beyond Laure’s actual vision of the city. The director edits together a series of bird’s-eye views of Paris. The camera’s gaze allows us to ‘travel’ meta-cinematically into the sphere of the possible: possibly, the sphere of Laure’s imagination as the camera’s wanderings are edited through an eye-line match of Laure looking out the window (see Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

Vendredi soir: Laure looking out from the window of her apartment

The window sheds light on how a woman is locked in away from the outside world of men and also allows her a vision on the world essential to creativity. About this scene that multiplies views of the city, Beugnet writes that it evokes the ‘vertiginous choice of stories that the city contains’ (2004, 186). The window of her apartment magically allows Laure to wander, to look at other people while remaining in a ‘space of her own’. Later in the film, the car windows push this spatial liminality and imaginative wandering further, allowing Laure to enter into contact with others from a semi-private space. Windows in the film give form to the frames of patriarchy that contain Laure within a gendered role and open up the outcomes of moving in with her partner to different possible stories.

What I call a ‘wandering camera’ introduces the magical into the realism of the film and positions Laure on the threshold of mobility. It does so by drawing a parallel between the illuminated windows and Laure’s immobility, and also by emphasising the mobility of the outside world through the passing of time and a high-angle establishing shot of fast-forwarded cars piling up at a traffic light. In the apartment sequence, the wandering camera and the visual contrast between the fast-moving editing and the cars ceasing to move forward figures as the first magical realist elements of the film. The wandering camera converts Laure’s apartment—and even more obviously her car—into what Giuliana Bruno calls a ‘mobile-house’, a ‘space oftransito’ (2002). The camera ‘magically’ offers Laure the wandering gaze that cinema offers to women. Laure meta-cinematically becomes empowered to look without being looked at, without her female body being identified as a problem for ‘public’ spaces. As we will see, this empowerment is similar to that of Wadjda and her mother who ‘hide’ behind their veils and on the roof of their house, and of Sibel’s appropriation of domestic spaces as spaces of transit in Head-On. By bringing magical elements into Vendredi soir,Claire Denis introduces a critique of the patriarchal rules that govern urban spaces.

The early scenes of the film point to the difficulty Laure has leaving her apartment and moving in with her partner. Her move is problematic because it represents a move towards dependency, and the film suggests that she may not be able to fully commit to this space. As she is moving into François’ apartment, rather than him moving into hers, she risks not being able to find Woolf’s ‘space of her own’, a space of creative production, imagination, and self-transformation (insofar as it has a window) (1945 [1929], 22–23). When the film begins, the sun is setting as Laure says goodbye to her apartment. She has packed numerous boxes (suggesting she has lived there for a long time). As she is leaving a space that she fully inhabits, Laure is jumping into an unknowable future, a space which may be shaped by patriarchal dynamics as a result of the heteronormative relation with her partner.⁴ As she leaves her apartment to go to her friend’s house for dinner, Laure’s hand is filmed in a close-up; she pauses for a moment while holding her car keys, highlighting two sets of keys next to each other: her car keys and François’ apartment keys, which are labeled ‘chez nous’ (‘our place’). As she grabs her car keys and leaves, François’ keys are shown in a close-up, sitting alone on a table in the dark, empty apartment. The pause in Laure’s gesture emphasises her choice to grab her own car keys rather than François’ keys and conveys her doubts about moving in with him. Once she is in the street, Laure calls François from a public phone box. During their conversation she refers to the apartment as ‘his’ before correcting herself and saying ‘ours’. She remarks, ‘I need to train myself to say “at ours”’. As if to cement this momentous occasion, she repeats ‘chez nous’ (‘our place’) several times to herself.

A close-up superimposes Laure’s inexpressive face over lit apartment windows with their light orange curtains and black bars and frames (see Fig. 3.2).⁵ The use of a telephoto lens flattens the windows, reducing them to faded coloured shapes in the darkness of the night, which gives form to affects of entrapment. The shot of the windows merging on Laure’s face, and the Parisian rooftops and windows seen at the beginning of the film, evoke the character’s imaginary of houses as spaces of both intimacy and containment.⁶ On the one hand, the windows merging with Laure’s face evoke the domestic space as a place of intimacy and protection, which is reinforced by the warm orange colours. On the other hand, the dark frames dividing the screen and visually cutting up Laure’s face, as they merge with her image, reveal her mixed feelings about moving into her partner’s apartment.

Fig. 3.2

Vendredi soir: Laure looking towards or imagining lit windows that pierce the darkness of the night

Laure’s habitation of the apartment, the car, and the motel always appears in continual transformation through how she affects and is affected by social relations. Laure’s sensory habitation of space always functions as an affective passage depending on how the relational and contagious impacts of other bodies on hers increase or decrease her ability to act. Laure’s extension of her spaces of intimacy originates in (re-)connecting to the erotic, whereby she transforms her negative affects towards patriarchal spaces into embodied ‘generative desires’. While at the beginning of the film, the window locks the woman character in a geometrical space of piled-up boxes, it also allows for an imagination of a sphere of possibilities. If balconies, balustrades, and windows appear as boundaries separating ‘feminine domesticity’ from ‘the masculine spheres of production’ (in the words of Mary Ann Doane 1987, 288), they also function as ‘soft screens’ that allow these boundaries to be crossed and binaries to be transformed.

A Space of Intimacy: Recollection Objects and Haptic Cinematic Space

Throughout the film, haptic images, cinematography, and sounds liberate spaces from their seeming ‘fixity’ in discourse and gendered narratives. As Laure touches and sorts objects more attentively in her apartment a handheld camera films her gestures in closer shots and the musical score goes silent: there is silence, punctuated only by sounds of the objects that Laure moves and packs (along with some murmurs to herself and the throbbing noise of the electric heater). These sounds give texture to the space, which Laure inhabits through bodily sensations that transcend any pre-given gendered narrative. The aural texture given to the space and Laure’s relation to objects in this sequence indicates a constant passage of affect: she moves from inhabiting space that is seemingly fixed in her sociocultural and gendered situation (a single, middle-aged, middle-class woman, which becomes evident as the film progresses) to inhabiting space through bodily sensations. The apartment and her car function as ‘spaces of her own’. Laure fully inhabits these spaces of intimacy through ‘sense-memories’, the affective past that objects contain. For Laure, these objects are those that she handles: the objects she selects to take with her to her partner’s apartment, and those that she discards and leaves behind.

Objects in Vendredi soircorrespond to what Laura U. Marks calls ‘recollection-objects’: objects that carry collective and personal memory and ‘condens[e] time within themselves’ (2000, 77). Deleuze’s ‘recollection-images’ (himself following Bergson’s idea of duration, as touched upon in the first chapter of this book) are ‘floating, dream-like images’ that cannot be directly connected to history (Marks 2000, 37). Like any object, they enclose both virtual and actual affects; objects embody endless potentialities based on the multiple forms that they can take, as well as an actualised present form, which makes objects appear (mistakenly) fixed and immutable (see Deleuze 1966). In one respect, recollection-objects may appear to fix Laure’s apartment in time, creating a site of apparently ‘fixed’ meaning, containment, and immobility in opposition to the ‘mobility’ of the city outside, which Laure explores later in the film. As Marks writes, objects that ‘condens[e] time within themselves’ may appear fossil-like in an ‘infinitely contracted past’ that they bring into the present (77–78). In another respect, Laure’s affective relation to these objects is further enhanced by the fact that they condense her sense memories and provide possible ways to act and react to her present situation. The objects that Laure handles with care, as the haptic shots suggest, function as potential traitsdunion between the past, the present, and the future (in the new apartment). The ‘recollection-objects’ are invested with the power to transform the new apartment into a space of Laure’s own.

The recollection-objects of the apartment sequence function as sites of meaning for Laure. For instance, the red skirt that she decides to keep (and in fact puts on in the book by Emmanuèle Bernheim from which the film was adapted, 1998) carries a sense of the erotic, a forgotten sexuality. The objects seem to entrap social situations and past affects, which they relocate in other, new, spaces. A red lampshade that Laure discards also represents her petit bourgeois sense of domesticity (before becoming an object of ‘intimacy’ when it reappears in the motel room). In the midst of scenes of Laure packing, the films cuts to the basement of Laure’s building and shows the concierge rescuing the red lampshade from the rubbish bin. As the only scene in which a character other than Laure or Jean appears on screen without being in their presence, it clearly expresses the object’s function as a ‘carrier’ of Laure’s intimacy while also expressing her bourgeois situation in comparison to that of the concierge, portrayed as a poorer immigrant (which is evident through the character’s accent), who cannot afford to throw away well functioning objects.⁷

Laure’s recollection-objects evoke the ‘fixed’ appearance that places can take, fixed into gendered, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. While recollection-objects such as Laure’s red lampshade enclose in themselves her socioeconomic ability to inhabit a cosy, warm house or motel room, they also convey past affects and the comfort and intimacy of domestic spaces. They contain the potential to affirmatively transform a space that Laure fears is already bound to be ruled by gender laws; they are able to connect her to her senses and embodiment of space, which is transmitted through haptic images. When the red lampshade that Laure throws out ‘magically’ reappears in the motel room, it converts her habitation of this space with Jean (through potentially heteronormative spatialities) into a ‘space of her own’, a space in constant transformation through affective relations and social relations.

The haptic framing of recollection-objects turn the apartment, the car, and the motel room into spaces of intimacy, confirming Doreen Massey’s idea that spaces always exist through social relations and in continual transformation. Compared to the white, gray, and beige tones of her now empty apartment, the orange and red colours of recollection-objects (the lampshade, electric heater, curtains, and the skirt) evoke for Laure the intimate dimension of the apartment: its value as ‘inhabited space’. In particular, the bright orange light of the electric heater and its throbbing noise provide a consistency to the otherwise silent and disembodied apartment; the heater contains within itself Laure’s sense-memories and her affective habitation of space, reinforced by the winter weather outside. As Bachelard points out, the aesthetic evocation of winter time increases the dwelling aspect of the house (1961, 66).⁸ The mise-en-scène of the film makes the winter time setting of the diegesis visible; the dialogue of the characters references the cold, the characters wear winter clothes, steam comes out of characters’ mouths when they speak and from the exhaust pipes of cars, and the crisp winter light of the day unfolds outside the window of the apartment.⁹ Each of these elements reinforces the ‘intimate value’ of inhabited spaces.

If the recollection-objects of Vendredi Soir do not quite express the intercultural dimension of displacement that Laura U. Marks describes (2000, 77), they nonetheless contain Laure’s personal history, connecting her to her past and expressing a kind of ‘social displacement’ between her life as a single woman and her affective (and necessarily sociocultural) knowledge of the potential gendered restrictions associated with moving to her male partner’s apartment. As Laure packs up her apartment into boxes, the camera films her in close-ups or in tight, obstructed medium shots. We see how Laure carefully handles objects, tries on clothes, and tests the springs of her mattress. Such images transmit Laure’s lived sensations, the sense-memories of her life as a single woman. Through extreme close-ups and long takes in which Laure manipulates her curtains, for instance, Denis forces the viewer to focus on the texture of objects and thereby give shape to the affectivity of Laure’s apartment. The mise-en-scène create a sensory atmosphere of intimacy: her apartment is a space that she can fully inhabit in opposition to an outside world dominated by men who look at her female body as a problem, as I will explore further later in this chapter. As ‘haptic’ images show Laure handling objects in close-up or extreme close-up, they create textures and make space, ‘as part of the fabric of cinematic space’ (on textures and creation of space on screen, see Lucy Life Donaldson 2014, 81–111). The lighting and colours of the scene haptically create a ‘texture’ or an affective atmosphere (in Ben Anderson’s term, 2009): a space of intimacy.

The haptic layer of the film gives shape to the micro-transformations of Laure’s affective habitation of space. When Laure takes the sexy red skirt out of her wardrobe (a piece of clothing that she has not worn in a long time and had almost forgotten) and tries it on, it puts her in touch with the erotic again. The tight close-ups convey the haptic ‘effect’ of the dress on Laure’s leg, the intensity of its red colour, and its deep split as she tries the skirt on with high heels. These shots surpass the discursive dimensions of the scene and convey Laure’s submerged awareness of, and possibly fear or resistance to, the fact that she is about to give up the erotic in exchange for a ‘domesticated’ body.

By connecting spatial habitation to objects and to the body, these images disrupt the apparent fixity of the sociocultural dictates on which Laure’s gendered situation relies. These haptic images, which linger on Laure’s touch, on colours, and on texture, delay the narrative and interrupt the storyline—namely, the beginning of her conjugal life. They also open up a time of memories and sensations that interfere with and ultimately derail the ‘happy ending’. These images expand the moments of transition (packing, moving, and time on the road) into times of lived experience, of sensual coming to oneself. At home these images aesthetically morph the apartment into a lived space, one of imagination in continual transformation, through the sense-memories of its inhabitants.

The Car, a Vehicle of (Im)Mobility

This section explores in detail three main ideas of Vendredi soir that the analysis of the apartment space has already suggested. First, if Laure is shown as reluctant to leave her apartment, it is because of the seemingly unchangeable patriarchal structures that condition her spatial habitation, according to the binary logic of gender. The limitations to Laure’s movement, ensuing from such a logic, return once again when Laure moves from her apartment to the car. Second, the film’s haptic transmission of Laure’s affects and sense-memories construes her habitation of space as an affective and fluid present in continual transformation. Third, the film’s magical realism merges the seemingly simple and straightforward story of Laure’s shift from one place (her home) to another (her ‘new home’ with her partner) with Laure’s spatial imaginary, emphasising that space is inseparable from affects, and affects in turn are rooted—at least to an extent—in sense-memories. Below, I explore how the car provides Laure with yet another space for experiencing intimacy. As I argue, this is a space that the film sets up over and against the city—the patriarchal space the car traverses. As we will see, in Wadjda the bike and the roof become ‘vehicles’ for the girl’s (and her mother’s) escape from, and wilful transformation of, the gendering of social spaces; likewise, in Vendredi soir, Laure’s car offers her both protection from the male-dominated city and the opportunity to make contact with others.

As suggested earlier, in a great number of classical and popular films the car functions as an object of man’s desire, violence, and freedom; in short, it is a symbol of man’s mobility. In Vendredi soir, the car complicates the road movie genre’s association of ‘freedom’ and self-discovery with mobility. The semi-mobile car quite literally morphs into a space of transit between a ‘home’ seemingly fixed into past affects (Laure’s apartment) and a space of intimacy (the motel room and potentially her new apartment with François). By immobilising the car, Denis challenges the idea that the transformation of the subject arises from his or her mobility and situates it instead in the expansion of one’s spaces of intimacy. Jean-Luc Godard also dealt with the theme of immobility in his film Weekend (1967). One could argue that the cars stuck in traffic in Weekend epitomise the absurdity (or purposelessness and meaninglessness) of human existence. In contrast, Denis’ camera affirmatively transforms the modern apocalyptic imaginary about immobilised cars into an opportunity to embrace one’s desires. As I demonstrate below, Laure’s car becomes a domestic space first, a liminal one second, and finally, a space of intimate contact.

More than being simply a means of transport, Laure’s car fulfils the role of a home that is no longer to be found in her old apartment or indeed in her new one with her partner. The car provides her with refuge (in a moment of homelessness) and protects her from the patriarchal city that negatively affects her full habitation of space. The car also provides Laure with the self-confidence that was denied to Jeanne and Marie in Messidor. In the first instance, Laure’s car still figures as a necessary vehicle for her to move about in a ‘sphere of men’,¹⁰ the city that she observed from the safety of her apartment. Interestingly, Denis continually subverts the very notion of the city being a sphere of mobility and ‘masculinity’.¹¹ As Laure leaves her safe domestic space, from where she could observe the city unobserved, she is immediately confronted with the ‘dangers’ that the urban space represents for a woman who is on her own at night (as is also seen in Head-On). Soon after Laure enters her car, a man bangs his palm on her window, startling her. Only slightly lit by street lights, the white face of the man contrasts with his dark outfit and the darkness of the street, both elements that endow him with a frightening look. Instead of opening the car, as the man wanted, Laure locks the doors and starts the engine. However, the man starts walking behind Laure’s car and is obviously annoyed. Even though we come to understand that the man was in fact only asking for a lift (because of the general transport strike), the mise-en-scène still portrays him as ‘frightening’, aesthetically conveying how much the patriarchy of the urban space has negatively affectedLaure (see Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3

Vendredi soir: Frightening man mockingly waves to Laure

The mise-en-scène of the first scenes of Laure in her car, much like the scenes in her apartment, convey her affective relation to the city space that is, in this case, expressed by her (socially induced) unease as a woman travelling alone in the urban space at night.¹² Although these images are not point-of-view shots and remain unattributed—filmed by a wandering camera—the framing of Laure and other characters stuck in their cars successfully renders Laure’s subjective perception of the city. As Elizabeth Wilson (2001) notes and as I highlighted in my analysis of Messidor, Laure appears fearful in her (restricted) habitation of the city. The chiaroscuro lighting and the claustrophobic close-ups of other people behind their windows give them a frightening and ghostly appearance. This emphasises both the stressful dimension of the urban space (especially in its congested state) and Laure’s spatial imaginaries, conditioned by being negatively affected in her habitation of the urban space previously (as illustrated by her reaction to the ‘frightening’ man). Rather than thresholds of mobility, windows now appear as openings to the other (whether frightening or desiring, just as Jean will be for Laure later in the film).

Much as she locks her car door in response to the ‘frightening’ man, Laure responds to the ghostly presence of others by fashioning her car as an intimate space of protection that ultimately contains her. Her habitation of the space of the car is evident in its habitual aspect. When Laure gets into her car, she dries her wet hair, an act which ‘domesticates’ the car. Immobilised in the traffic jam, Laure sits at the back and goes through her boxes; she starts rereading her books out loud and sorts her things while talking to herself. It is a continuation of the scene in her apartment, except now all of her activities reinforce the ‘homeliness’ of her car.¹³ After she has emptied and left her apartment, the car remains the only ‘space of her own’, an object into which Laure extends her intimacy.

Laure’s car enables her to inhabit the city, while at the same time it contains her. When seen from the outside of the car, Laure often appears ‘locked in’, trapped inside, due to the window frames. The car’s space seems to enclose Laure. The cinematography of these car scenes portrays Laure’s body as belonging to the car (see Fig. 3.4), which also echoes the real spatial restrictions of the car during filming. After Laure has dried her hair, the next image, an extreme close-up of the fumes coming out of the car, cut together in a Eisensteinian montage, reinforces the idea that Laure’s body is united with her car. Laure converts her apartment into a space of her own, or into her own self, through recollection-objects; the car, likewise, ‘entraps’ Laure into a fixed idea of space, while also opening her to the outside and therefore potentially facilitating intimate contacts and spatial transformation through affective situations. This is in opposition to the seemingly fixed gendered structures of the male-dominated street located just outside of her car. The immobilised car is, before Laure’s encounter with Jean, a space of entrapment and containment due to the threatening presence of the masculine other outside. While Laure also becomes a body-machine, like all of the other drivers and passengers sitting in their cars, the fact that cars are depicted as immobile allows for their transformation into liminal spaces, spaces that stand on the threshold between an inside and an outside. If Laure’s car protects her from the world outside, it is also a ‘leaking’ space that opens onto the outside.

Fig. 3.4

Vendredi soir: Close-ups and frames within the frame contain Laure in her car, which drives forward without Laure watching

Affirmative Wandering

Rather than her car, it is the ‘wandering camera’ that provides Laure with mobility, a ‘magical’ or meta-cinematic mobility. The magical realism of the film converts the car into a poetic ‘gaseous’ object: a space existing through social contact and affective relations. Unlike the windows of the house, which appeared more ‘solid’ because they were situated “above” the city and did not provide intimate contact, the windows of the car appear as ‘soft screens’, at once marking the boundary of the domestic space and facilitating Laure’s imaginative ‘travel’ through the city as the camera wanders off from her car and explores the surroundings.

While the car provides a ‘mobile habitation of space’, ‘a dominant way of dwelling in contemporary experience’, it also becomes a form of ‘sensing the world through [a] screen’ (Sheller and Urry 2000, 747). In opposition to the close-ups and frames within the frame that contain Laure inside the car, at various times the camera leaves Laure’s car. In short, the camera acts like a bored passenger who explores the city while everyone is stuck in traffic. A pedestrian’s point of view replaces the bird’s-eye view of the beginning of the film, though it still remains unattributable. By rupturing the ‘authority’ of the gaze and blurring the boundaries of subjectivity, the wandering camera ‘frees’ Laure spatially, converting her into a disembodied flâneuse ‘[flourishing] in the interstices of the city’ (Wilson 1991, 8). When the camera leaves the car, it seems to take Laure along in its meandering by intermittently coming back to Laure in the car, who is filmed using claustrophobic close-ups or extreme close-ups. At times the camera escapes the confines of Laure’s car to film other passengers and cars in a range of medium to close-up shots. While ‘visiting’ other cars, the camera connects Laure with a collectivity of car-bodies similarly affected by the traffic jam; it also positions her on one of the many ‘virtual lines’ present within the real, so we see the way in which others inhabit space. Through the introducion of ‘magical’ elements into the realism of the film and the conversion of cars into poetic objects, images from the wandering camera and the soundtrack of the sequence ‘free’ the city and cars from their negative affects as male-dominated and frightening spaces.

The wandering camera ensures Laure’s ‘magical’ mobility through which she surpasses the negativity of women’s exclusion from the mobile ‘public’ sphere. As the camera films cars, roofs, bright lights, smoking hoods, sleeping passengers, and drivers, the characters merge with their cars, which become characters themselves that take their passengers with them (see Fig. 3.4).¹⁴ Hinchliffe’s classical score and the wandering camera interweave the car body with the human body and create a lyrical city in which cars appear to move by themselves, as if they were dancing (see Fig. 3.5). In this sequence, fixed a little above the ground, the wandering camera films the lights of slowly moving cars in a close-up with a telephoto lens, which reduces the depth of field and creates a surreal, ethereal atmosphere—non-anchored in real space. The classical music, tight shots, shallow depth of field, and very slow movements (of the camera and the cars themselves) portray a ballet of cars, transforming modern purposeful objects of transport into poetic abstractions. By recurrently filming smoke and steam in close-ups, Denis reinforces the magical dimension of the scene by giving cars a ‘poetic’ texture.

Fig. 3.5

Vendredi soir: Claire Denis’ ballet of cars

Elements of magical realism merge the ‘diegetic reality’ and Laure’s imaginary, both visually and aurally. Stuck in the traffic jam, Laure sings along to the popular 1979 French hit ‘Manureva’. In this scene, subjective shots are edited together with ‘authorial’ shots. While the camera alternates from handheld (when filming Laure’s [imaginative] vision) to fixed (when filming Laure from outside of the car), the sound inconsistently (albeit discreetly so) changes volume and source. From being diegetic, the sound becomes a soundtrack: the volume of the song lowers when the camera leaves Laure’s car and films her through the driver’s lateral window. As the camera wanders, the song surprisingly remains at the same volume, as if outside Laure’s window. The soundtrack confuses and disturbs the subjectivity of the shots and the realist aesthetic.

The magical realist aesthetic blurs inside and outside spaces, the ‘diegetic real’ and Laure’s imaginary, and activates the virtualities of the real. It is a ‘magical’ moment that brings out the liminality of the car space. Laure turns on the radio and a woman’s voice announces, ‘You all know that by now… Paris is at a complete standstill due to the public-transport strike’. The radio announcer seems to address Laure personally, who has been packing up all day and is probably ‘the only one who did not know’ (‘Y en a peut-être encore deux qui sont pas au courant’) about the strike. This is reinforced by the announcer’s intimate-sounding voice, almost a sensual whisper, characteristic of the (exclusively) female announcers of FIP radio (such as Jane Villenet, who is cast as the radio announcer in the film).¹⁵ While the voice ‘talking to Laure’ suggests offering a lift to cold, stranded pedestrians, the magical-realist aspect of this address is reinforced when Jean (Vincent Lindon) enters the car as if he himself heard the radio announcement (however unlikely).

It is the wandering camera, exiting Laure’s car, that in fact stumbles over Jean and ‘magically’ brings him to her car. The soft voice of the radio announcer and Jean’s first appearance on screen introduce a dream-like dimension to the car, giving it an aspect of a ‘space of intimacy’. According to Bachelard, ‘the house’ (and, as such, any inhabited space) ‘provides a shelter to the dream’ (‘la maison abrite la rêverie’ (1961, 34)). Laure falls asleep almost immediately after Jean has entered her car, which adds to the blurring of ‘diegetic reality’ and Laure’s imaginary. While the diegetic veracity of Laure and Jean’s night together is not important, the imaginary dimension granted to the film underlines the many paths that Laure’s life and her affective habitation of space can take. Oscillating between living as a single woman and living as part of a couple, Laure’s habitation of space is challenged in its everyday appearance as fixed and monotonous, which is epitomised in the car space when Jean enters. The car as a space of intimacy, a ‘shelter to the dream’, becomes a space of expansion of the virtual into the real.

Jean’s presence emphasises the liminal aspect of the car, on the border between Laure’s own space, protected from the hostility of the city, and a social space-time in which power dynamics and intimacy are to be negotiated. As soon as Jean steps into the car, the car appears as a space of passage, a space of transit. When Laure asks him where he wants to go, Jean answers with a soft, calm voice, ‘Vous n’aurez qu’à me laisser là où vous voulez’ (‘You can leave me wherever you wish’), suggesting that he diegetically exists to help Laure on her journey towards the erotic, towards her deep self and her refusal of conventions. Jean makes himself available to Laure’s desire, thereby at once penetrating and transforming Laure’s space of intimacy.

By continually blurring the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the imaginary, Denis destroys the gendered binaries that still permeate films ‘with’ cars, where cars are typically imagined as a male domain. The car window also figures as a threshold, as a direct opening to the other, onto the ‘spaces of men’ (for Laure, connoting both fear and excitement, as per Elizabeth Wilson’s description of the city, 2001). Rather than protecting or containing Laure inside, the car window connects her to the outside; it shapes the car as a space of transitions and transformations. Jean’s body seems to activate Laure’s desire and imagination; at once she feels his physical closeness while also relating to the heterosocial aspects of his ‘intimidating and protective’ male presence.¹⁶

Gendered Contacts, Affective Contacts

As seen in the previous section, the magical realism of Vendredi soir converts the car into a liminal space. Jean’s presence in the car brings in the gendered, patriarchal aspects of the city to Laure’s personal ‘domestic’ space; it both converts the car into a ‘housing of gender’ (in Bruno’s terms) and suspends gender as the two characters relate at the micro-level of affects, which allows Laure to reconnect to a long-forgotten desiring body. It is by constantly oscillating between patriarchy and embodiment of space that Vendredi soir manifests its affirmative political intentions, transforming the gendering of space into fluid relational habitation.

Jean climbs into Laure’s car uninvited, asking a rhetorical question (‘Can I come in?’), an act which demonstrates his sense of entitlement: as a man he feels it is legitimate to enter this woman’s space as if it were his own. Once in the car, his masculine body occupies more space than that of Laure, evinced in his few, smooth movements as well as in his gaze, straight ahead and beyond the windshield. While he only looks towards her a few times, with steady movements of the head, Laure repetitively glances at him in jerky movements. As opposed to the long takes that compose the first part of the film, short takes characterise the first interactions between Laure and Jean. Jean’s male presence affords him a position of spatial power over Laure’s female body, which, as Iris Marion Young (1980) would write, inhibits women’s spatial movement. The characters’ mutual desire and the contagiousness of affects that arise from their bodily presence in an intimate space, however, overshadow Laure’s nervousness at having a (male) stranger in her car. Laure’s connection to the erotic grants her the capability to rewrite her own story and her habitation of social spaces through sensations, instead of through the gender norms that govern them.¹⁷

As Jean steps into her car—Laure’s space of her own—his presence changes it, at a micro bodily level. This change takes place through contact between the characters, which the film chooses to convey haptically to the viewer. Upon entering the car, Laure instantly feels his presence; as Martine Beugnet writes, she can smell him, and his body comes with its weight (2004, 194). The silence of the scene is punctuated by diegetic sounds that give a materiality to the space (on textures in film, see also Donaldson 2014). The door opening and closing, Laure turning off the inside light, Jean closing the window, Jean’s movement on the seat, and Jean’s clearing of his throat all create a silence with consistency, a space of contact and intimacy. As he enters the car, he immediately lowers the passenger seat so that he can lie down comfortably. He says to Laure, ‘Il fait bon dans votre voiture’ (‘It’s warm in here’), which reinforces the ‘space of intimacy’ that the car offers. Through this familiar gesture, he ‘makes himself at home’. Jean could be perceived as Laure’s partner François, a confusion that is reinforced later in the motel scenes, since François never directly appears on screen. A dreamy-sounding score interrupts the silence and creates an atmosphere of rêverie, an affective and imaginative habitation of space.

On the one hand, the gendered power-geometries that Jean brings with him into Laure’s car culminates when Jean takes the wheel for a brief moment, and in his doing so the car regains its gendered aspects of ‘masculinity’, speed, and travel (Sheller and Urry 2000, 738). The aesthetic of the scene conveys Laure’s affective transformation. As a sombre score plays, a long take shows multiple dark window frames filmed from Laure’s point of view out of the passenger window in a low-angled, fast tracking shot. The reflection of these windows and shop signs then become abstract trails of light that superimpose over Laure’s bewildered face, filmed in a close-up through the lateral window that at times mask or erase her image. These scenes echo the window frames superimposed over Laure’s face earlier in the film when she was apprehensively thinking about her move to François’ apartment. The rhythm of the film, thus far slow and dream-like, becomes fast and object-driven as soon as Jean takes the wheel—as if the traffic jam had suddenly disappeared and the car had been relocated into a ‘masculine’ narrative of travel. The cinematography and editing of the scene, as well as the score- which introduces urgent violin music suggestive of the thriller genre- synesthetically produce the sensation of the car’s rapid motion and give shape to affects of anxiety.¹⁸ In an affective reaction to the motion that Jean imposes upon her, Laure becomes panicked and asks Jean to let her exit the vehicle, though the car is hers—it is as if she is conditioned by a gendered and normative spatiality that generally situates women as passengers rather than drivers (as Messidor also shows). This scene highlights the constant tension between a gendered spatial economy and an affective one that is in continual transformation, through the relational aspect of space and the contagiousness of affect.

On the other hand, the haptic aesthetic of the scenes with Jean in the car transmits Laure’s rewriting of her habitation of space through the erotic; hers is a body of affects and desire rather than a gendered body. It is by expanding Laure’s spaces of intimacy (her intimate contacts with other human and non-human bodies) in her car and in the motel room that the film suspends her habitation of space through gender and situates her within a ‘lived’ body. This is created through the exceptional (almost absurd and ‘magical’) traffic jam that brings the car to an unusual immobility and therefore facilitates affective contacts. By losing its speed, the car invites connections with others, affirming the subject’s embodied habitation of space. Through haptic images, Claire Denis transforms the traditional and seemingly fixed power-geometries of ‘public’ space into fluid micro-relations to space. She does so by closely filming Laure’s affective connections and blurring her bodily limits. This blurring will be increasingly apparent in the analysis of the motel room that follows.

Laure and Jean inhabit space affectively through their connection with each other. This becomes clearer during the course of the film, and especially so in the motel room. When Jean smokes, extreme close-ups show him inhaling and exhaling through his mouth and nose, while other extreme close-ups portray Laure physically reacting to the smell of the cigarette, lightly inhaling and exhaling the smoke of Jean’s cigarettes as she recalls an old habit. These haptic images create a space of intimacy, an ‘embodied’ cinematic space that ‘transcends’ Laure and Jean’s interactions as everyday performances of gender norms and situates them within the affective dimension of spatial habitation. In a point-of-view shot from Laure’s perspective, an extreme close-up shows Jean’s hand entering the opening of his shirt and making contact with his own skin (see Fig. 3.6), which reveals the texture of his bare skin and thus creates a haptic cinematic space, one that has a certain texture. Likewise, in the scene when Jean enters the car, the accumulation of haptic images creates an atmosphere, a space that continually changes through affective exchanges. When Laure watches Jean extend his legs, putting himself at ease, an extreme close-up shows her feet rubbing against each other, her knees extending, and her hands lightly stroking the steering wheel. The film’s focus on textures accentuates the intimacy of the car, wherein the characters develop desire for each other and inhabit space affectively, suspending their gendered identities. If one can never fully transcend gendered power relations within the current configuration of society, the haptic aesthetic of the film creates temporal and intermittent interruptions of power-geometries.

Fig. 3.6

Vendredi soir: Laure watches Jean passing his hand inside the collar of his shirt

There is no relation of subject-object anymore; no one ‘possesses’ the other with their gaze, but the characters look at each other just as they are touching themselves and being touched. Denis places much emphasis on hands touching each other or one another. For philosopher Merleau-Ponty, there is always a reversibility of the touching experience; as he explains, two hands of one’s body always simultaneously touch and are being touched, and this is also true with another’s body (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 183).¹⁹ I argue that if the power structures of social spaces are to be transformed, this can only occur through inhabiting space affectively, which means recognising the reversibility of experience. According to Merleau-Ponty, when experience is shared, it ‘reverts, transfers and reconverts’ one’s private world into a world ‘levied off’ from the world of all others (1968, 142). The haptic aesthetic opens up a world of relations and potentialities, one that puts into question binaries and power structures.

If at first the car seems to contain Laure in a comfortable space of domesticity or accommodate her where the patriarchal city does not, the wandering camera and magical-realist elements convert the car into a ‘leaking’, liminal space. On the border between inside and outside, mobility and immobility, the car becomes a space of intimate contacts. The magical realism of the film blurs the ‘diegetic real’ and allows for the re-writing of the gendered habitation of space along imaginative lines. The haptic aesthetic reinforces the idea that space is not fixed within sociocultural norms, but is instead ‘lived’ and in continual transformation, as a result of affective connections. It is the combination of representational elements and magical and haptic aspects that shape the affirmative aesthetic of the film. The negative affects of Laure’s habitation of the city morph into a rewriting of spatial habitation through bodily senses.

Desiring Bodies

In reaction to how the male domination of social spaces has negatively affected Laure’s spatial imaginary, Laure—just like Sibel in Head-On and the title character of Wadjda—experiences wilfulness to fully inhabit space in an unconscious, embodied way and at the micro-level of the skin. Laure’s habitation of the third space of the motel room (the first two spaces being her apartment and car) where she spends the night with Jean, takes form as a haptic cinematic space. As the previous section has already suggested, it is by haptically conveying the characters’ embodiment of space that Vendredi soir subverts the seemingly fixed gendering of space. As the characters are shown inhabiting space through their physical sensations, they are portrayed as lived bodies mutually affecting each other, creating an affective ‘atmosphere’ (see also Anderson 2009), thereby producing space itself.

It is the combination of the representational with haptic and recollection-images that brings out the affirmative aesthetic of the film. Let us for example, consider the café scene (described in more detail below) and the moment when Jean starts driving Laure’s car: the characters’ dialogue and the mise-en-scène depict Jean as leading their movements.²⁰ On a haptic level, however the characters’ desire appears mutual, as does their decision to act on it. While the representational level reaffirms gender norms—stereotypically, men make decisions, women approve—, the haptic level give shape to Laure’s wilfulness and connection to the erotic.

Whereas Sibel and Wadjda are overtly wilful, as we will see, perhaps by acquiring a cultural distance from their own selves (a diasporic distance and a ‘mediated’ one through television, respectively), Laure is still caught within the compulsory performativity of gender that Judith Butler describes (1990, 1993). Thus, arguably, her wilfulness happens at a micro-level (in this case, through skin contact), as is the case with Wadjda’s mother (albeit differently). It is the haptic aesthetic of Vendredi soir that conveys Laure’s micro-instances of wilfulness, thereby affirming her habitation of space.

As opposed to Butler, who argues that there is no escape from gender other than through its reiteration, I maintain that considering the body as a ‘lived body’ and gender as a situation which is dynamic and constantly being negotiated (Beauvoir 1949; Moi 2001) allows for transformations at the level of both spatial habitation and gender discourse.²¹ Laure’s performance of ‘femininity’ clearly appears three times in the film.²² Each time, Laure’s habitation of space is conveyed through sensory experiences and a ‘lived body’ that represents ‘the radical uninhabitability’ of gender (Butler 1993, 25). For Butler, gender is uninhabitable insofar as it sets roles and expectations that are ideals, which can thus not be reached. Since gender is a social construction rather than something that arises from the body or the subject, it cannot be fully integrated but always remains a performance (from which one cannot escape, according to Butler). While Laure performs femininity (unconsciously and inescapably so), the aesthetic of the film reveals a body that is lived, and thereby suspends gender.

Visual exchanges between Laure and other women in the film emphasise the ‘uninhabitability’ of gender. After Jean has left her car, Laure finds him again in a café where she sees him (from outside through the window) interacting with a younger woman. The café scene illustrates the power dynamics that dictate heterosexual interactions, the habitation of heterosocial spaces, and how spatial imaginaries are gendered. The sound and haptic images reveal the subjectivity of the scene. From the outside, Laure looks at the young woman and Jean playing pinball through the café’s window; their voices are muffled, but as Laure enters the café, the sounds of the pinball machine grow louder and Jean’s words become clearer. The young woman appraises Laure, looking her up and down (see Fig. 3.7). An extreme close-up of Jean slightly touching Laure’s hand with intention highlights the desire between them. The camera films the young woman’s gaze towards their hands and then shows her own hand on the pinball machine in a close-up that blurs her uncovered belly in the background (see Fig. 3.7). The editing of these two images underlines the women’s internalisation of sexual norms and their play of power to get to touch Jean. Like many scenes in the film, this one mingles representational and haptic images; it requires the viewer’s critical vision of the heteronormative habitation of space and Laure’s performativity of gender, while inviting them to experience Laure’s embodied habitation of space.²³

Fig. 3.7

Vendredi soir: Focus on a younger woman’s gaze and hands in a café

In Laure and Jean’s first embrace in the street en route to the motel, the haptic images of their intimate connections blur the individuality of their bodies and therefore their gendered identification. When Laure and Jean kiss for the first time, they appear in chiaroscuro: they are blurred and appear ‘strangely and terribly flat’ in the way they are lit (in Deleuze’s words regarding chiaroscuros). This lighting constructs what Deleuze would call an any-space-whatever (1986, 111), which ‘universalises’ the story, extending it to a specific sociocultural collectivity. It also emphasises the banality of the moment and creates a ‘sphere of the possible’ (Deleuze 1986, 111), an oneiric atmosphere created by quiet, tinkling piano notes. This atmosphere allows for different conceptions of space outside of the patriarchal status quo. The camera remains filming in extreme close-up during the whole scene, with a warm light illuminating the characters’ faces and leaving everything around them in utter darkness, thereby reinforcing its ‘magical’ appearance. Meanwhile, the direct sounds of the scene convey the characters’ embodiment of space, in this case, the street. The rustling of their clothes is foregrounded, while traffic can be heard in the background. Hearing the rustling sounds of clothes and the faint sounds of their kisses synesthetically brings us to feel the textures of their skin and their warm wool jackets. As the sounds of the traffic become a constant hum, the viewer becomes increasingly immersed in the lovers’ embrace.

The extreme close-ups of the intimate scene in the street convey the reversibility of their touch; they are simultaneously kissing and being kissed (see Fig. 3.8). The hands that continually invade the frame meta-cinematically emphasise the ‘tactile gaze of the camera’ (Beugnet 2004, 192), and the haptic images the camera creates, such as the long take in extreme close-up that shows one of Laure’s gloves on the ground. The glove recalls Laure’s lamp; it too is a recollection-object able to crystallise her sense-memories, having appeared earlier in the film. The texture of the glove conveys the warmth of the embrace and situates the habitation of space as embodied.

Fig. 3.8

Vendredi soir: Laure’s and Jean’s faces become almost indistinguishable as they kiss

When Laure and Jean decide to act on their mutual desire and go to a motel together, they both initiate the movement, thus showing equality in the decision-making process. The fast editing of extreme close-ups and the unattributable diegetic sounds synesthetically transmit the impatience of Laure and Jean’s embrace. The haptic aesthetic of the kissing scene extends to the images in the motel room and blurs the identity of the characters. Instead of filming the characters’ faces during intercourse, Denis’s camera shatters the cinematic conventions of erotic-sexual encounters by filming hands in extreme close-ups and by moving with the rhythm of the bodies. A shaky handheld camera films body parts in extreme close-up: a hand on a knee and on a back, upper and inner thighs, parts of a leg, a hand removing underwear. The camera finds its way under winter clothes and gets lost in the characters’ hair and the caresses of unidentifiable thighs, bellies, and backs (see Fig. 3.9). Extreme close-ups and chiaroscuro lighting merge bodies into one, disrupting the attributability of body parts to one specific sexed body. Both Laure and Jean have dark brown hair, dark clothes, very similar complexions, and body proportions, all of which facilitates their appearance as one androgynous body. As the characters’ bodies merge, so too do the boundaries of gender, thereby challenging traditional power structures.

Fig. 3.9

Vendredi soir: Body parts in extreme close-up in the motel room

In addition to the haptic images that blur the limits of their bodies, the actors playing Laure and Jean have a queer appearance, one that refuses the binaries of femininity and masculinity. Laure appears on screen without ‘feminine’ attributes, wearing androgynous clothes (with the exception of the token appearance of the red sexy skirt), and no makeup. She is filmed from the back when showering. The actress who plays Laure, Valérie Lemercier, has also acted the part of a transgender person in one of the few films she herself directed, Le derrière (Lemercier 1999), and has appeared as a transgender on the cover of the gay magazine Têtu.²⁴ While Jean (Vincent Lindon) embodies, at least in part, the heterosocial dynamics of power, his masculine appearance is queered (or ‘disorientated’, as Sara Ahmed would put it, 2010) by his soft voice, his androgynous look, his availability as Laure’s fantasy, and his ‘in-betweenness’ as a ‘real’ character or as a product of the imagination. Both the characters’ costumes and characterisation on screen, and the aesthetic representation of their erotic encounter in the motel room, confound the limits of bodies and create a ‘passage’ between and beyond gender.

Rewriting Spatial Habitation: A Place Called Home?

As a result of her night in the motel, Laure comes to live fully and inhabit affirmatively the spaces outside her apartment. The film’s aesthetic expands Laure’s ‘spaces of intimacy’ (the spaces she fully inhabits) from her private apartment to semi-public social spaces. While the motel room is first marked in the film as ‘neutral’ (as an impersonal space, waiting to be inhabited), the mise-en-scène transforms it into a space of intimacy; the objects and the bodies’ marks on each other, on the bed, and on pieces of furniture charge the room affectively, and create an erotic connection. The film once again adopts poignant haptic shots to give form to both Laure’s immersion in the space of the motel room and the depiction of the motel room as an intimate space. For example, just like the scenes in the car, the scenes in the hotel room show the characters’ alertness to their ‘proximal senses’—smell and touch in particular. ‘Recollection-objects’ also return in the motel scenes, rooting the characters even further through their senses. Compared to the car that Laure had come to construct as a space of her own before Jean’s intrusion, the motel room already figures as a space-time of transit, thoroughly open to the virtualities of the real. The room is a genuine any-space-whatever: a ‘pure locus of the possible’, a singular space which has ‘lost its homogeneity… so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways’ (Deleuze 1986, 109). The possibility of ‘writing’ this space anew increases, because—as the concierge declares—the motel is empty, uninhabited (because of the transport strike).

This new space gives Laure the opportunity to appropriate it as her own space, and to imagine that Jean, not she, is the one moving in to the space. The paratextual elements of the film support this interpretation. For example, the film’s DVD menu is entitled ‘Back home’; additionally, the novel on which the film is based makes it very clear that Laure fantasises about the motel room as her home (‘Laure locked the door. That was it. They were at home’ [Bernheim 1998, 61, translation mine]). This occurs in the book when the omniscient narrator compares the motel room to Laure’s own apartment: ‘Small, square and with a low ceiling, this room looked like hers. Laure stopped. It was hers. She was at her place with Frédéric. And just as every night, before going to bed, he would turn down the heating. Because together at night, they would never get cold’ (92–93, translation mine).²⁵ Through Laure and Jean’s habitation of the space in the film, the motel room is transformed from being dark, coldly lit, and blue-hued (similar to Laure’s empty apartment), to a warm, inviting space (it becomes golden-hued). The change in colour enhances the sense of ‘intimacy’, the constant affective exchange between (human and non-human) bodies, which results in spatial transformation.

Objects from Laure’s apartment magically resurface in the motel room, such as the red lamp, and somewhat facilitate the merging of the two spaces. When the characters come back to the motel room after having had dinner, images from both Laure’s apartment and the motel room are edited together in a parallel montage, united through a red-orange tone that contrasts with the chiaroscuro of the sequence as a whole. The red lampshade that floats around the room, the bright light of the electric heater, the red bedsheets, and the orange tip of Jean’s cigarette all bathe the dark space in a warm orange light. The close-ups on these objects separate them from their actual spatial environment and create intimate affects. This montage appears as a ‘recollection-sequence’, an imaginative rewriting of home; not as fixed in time or as ‘housing of gender’, but rather as a space that is always in transit, one that (human and non-human) bodies always affectively make and remake.

The haptic aesthetic (the emphasis on touch, colours, and textures) and magical realism of the film situate space on two simultaneous and contingent levels: of affects and fluid collective power-geometries. The film’s aesthetic ‘magically’ converts Jean into an ‘any-man-whatever’. We know very little about him—he could even pass for François, since François never appears in the film.²⁶ Multiple times in the motel room Jean’s head is out of shot or is captured using extreme close-ups that somewhat blur his face, making him indistinguishable from any other man. This reinforces the ‘collective’ (or ‘universal’ yet socioculturally specific and heterosexual) dimension of their encounter and brings spatial habitation to the micro-level of bodily affects. In a close-up, Jean takes off his coat and places it on a hanger, and as he exits the frame, Laure enters it in the same continuous shot—underscoring the intimate relationship they have, or better yet, its familiar domestic character. When she hangs her coat next to his, a tighter shot in slow motion shows her hand touching both coats. The scene’s chiaroscuro lighting and focus on textures and sensations rather than on Jean as an individual seems to stop time and give form to a space with texture; in this scene personal identity matters less than the affects of social relations and spatial experience. The scene rehearses Laure’s move into her partner François’ apartment in a different light: as a lived body rather than through gendered spatial norms.

If recollection-objects may appear to fix the motel room as a type of domestic space, the scenes when Laure visits other empty motel rooms and runs down the street at the end of the film point to a genuine fluidity of space-time. Instead of recreating another home with walls and borders that protects Laure from the outside social world, the motel room figures as a space of intimacy in continual transformation and open to the outside. Windows and balconies provide ideal liminal spaces—similar to the roof and balcony in Wadjda and Head-On, respectively—in between public/private, social/pre-social, any-space-whatever/space of intimacy. The balcony, which belongs to one of the empty motel rooms that Laure visits while Jean is sleeping—not to the room that she inhabits together with Jean—gives shape to the virtualities of spatial habitation: the possibilities beyond yet still within heteronormative patriarchal culture. On the balcony and later in the streets, Laure fully and ‘freely’ inhabits space from an embodied affirmative position, as a desiring body rather than solely imprisoned by gender norms. This intimates the possibility that spatial relations (and Laure and Francois’ future together) may not necessarily involve women’s ‘sacrifice’ of their own space or subjectivity, even from within a heterosexual norm.

Filming Laure as she stands on the balcony, the camera alternates between extreme close-ups of her hair moving in the chilly winter breeze, and medium shots of the transparent curtains similarly moving in the light wind. This scene contrasts with an earlier scene, when Laure steps into the street and blows her hair dry with the car’s air vents, a gesture edited in parallel with the exhaust fumes coming out of her car. Now on the balcony, the wind penetrates Laure’s hair directly, without the car as a mediator and a protector from the outside world. Likewise, the wind stirring the curtains suggests a material, embodied space that contrasts with the ‘immateriality’ of the car’s exhaust fumes dissipating in the city air. In opposition to her first ‘magical haunting’ experience of the city, seen through the wandering camera, Laure now inhabits space through and with her body.

In the last image of the film, Laure runs joyfully through the early-morning street towards the camera (see Fig. 3.10). A wide shot situates her in the immediate environment. Several aspects of the mise-en-scène are significant. Narratively, Laure has just left the room where Jean is still sleeping. Laure lives her fantasy, and she is empowered by it—this constitutes quite a contrast in the cinema, where women are so frequently demeaned or ‘exploited’ as objects of male fantasy.

Fig. 3.10

Vendredi soir: Laure runs through the street towards the camera

Aesthetically, this scene is the first in which Laure’s body appears uncut and in daylight. Compared to the general languid pace of the film, Laure’s action now initiates a rapid movement. While the slow motion of Laure’s movement towards the camera embeds her embodied habitation of space, the faster rhythm of Hinchliffe’s light and harmonious music increases the impression of her mobility. By rediscovering her body as an empowered, desiring body, Laure has gained self-confidence, and thus social and spatial power that allows her to affirmatively inhabit space and interact with the other.

Vendredi soir affirms the woman protagonist’s habitation of space through micro-instances. Laure is in the precarious situation of losing her own space. By moving into her partner’s apartment, she risks being assigned a domestic role dictated by gender norms and expectations. The film conveys the negative affects of her situation, while simultaneously providing an image of alternative spatial habitation. While it highlights the patriarchal nature of space and Laure’s insecure habitation of ‘public’ spaces, it also activates the virtual within the real. By adopting a haptic aesthetic and focusing on colours and textures, the film reveals a virtual reality, where both men and women are free to follow their desires. Claire Denis’ film thus displays ‘affirmative aesthetics’: aesthetically establishing affirmative ethics whereby negativity figures as ‘a productive moment in the dialectical scheme, which fundamentally aims at overturning the conditions that produced it in the first place’ (Braidotti 2011, 285). Whether the imaginative layer represents ‘true’ diegetic events is irrelevant; what matters is that it opens up possibilities for Laure and other women to inhabit space affirmatively.

Just as in Wadjda and Head-On, as we will see, Vendredi soir suggests that social and spatial transformation occurs at the threshold of mobility by inhabiting space affectively. Instead of embarking on a journey of self-discovery that travel promises in classical narratives, all three protagonists, Laure, Wadjda, and Sibel, are able to transform spaces of ‘(im)mobility’ into spaces of intimate connections. Laure’s expansion of her spaces of intimacy originates in a connection to the erotic (as the last chapter on Head-On will explore further), whereby women transform the negative affects of patriarchal spaces into embodied generative desires. Vendredi soir, Wadjda, and Head-On (and to a certain extent Messidor) show how women create spaces of self-confidence for themselves in spite of the patriarchal structures that negatively affect their mobility. Most importantly, these films suggest—mostly through their aesthetic choices—that spaces are not fixed within these oppressive structures and that other affirmative possibilities exist.