Sex, the City and the Cinematic: The Possibilities of Female Spectatorship in Claire Denis's Vendredi soir

Vendredi soir (2001) is a film of enigma and contradiction. It is the story of a thirty-something Parisian woman relocating from her apartment to that of her partner, who—en route—meets and spends the night with a stranger. The fate of both protagonists beyond this night remains apparently unexplored; its ethics largely unconsidered. It is a form of road film, yet in distinction to much of the latter's cinematic history of representation, its director (Claire Denis), cinematographer (Agnès Godard), and protagonist (Laure, played by Valérie Lemercier) are women. Moreover, if Vendredi soir is in part a film-poem about cars and roads, it evokes the latter not through the liberating mobility we expect from the road narrative, but through its immobility and slowness. As shown in the first half of the film, it is a paralyzing transport strike that prevents Laure from getting across town to the dinner engagement which will precede her move; however, rather than constituting narrative frustration, this obstacle reroutes the film toward alternative pleasures and other narrative possibilities.

In this essay, then, I will consider Denis's film in terms of its evocation of a cinematic space we might hesitantly describe as female. Hesitantly, inasmuch as such gendered categories are not to be inferred (solely) from authorship or subject matter, given the essentialist and politically unproductive signification that implies.¹ Rather, I would argue that an authorship such as that of Denis leaves markers of its visibility in a manner that is interrogative and dialogic. The "feminine" text, in other words, becomes central to a feminist project in the way it focalizes what is at stake in the latter: the possibilities of the film text as a redefinition of thought, and of the possibilities of female desire, pleasure, and subjectivity.

Here, in its confounding of the trajectories of both the car (as signifier of mobility) and an historically masculine narrative of mobile liberation, the film situates itself within the problematics and potentialities of the postmodern. As Paul Virilio has argued, the sheer speed of communications technology and the superfluity of travel has brought about a void in our experience of the physical world;² a view underlined by François Maspero's observation that Paris has become a series of points linked by the "grey continuum" of the car or train journey.³ Significantly, this spatial indeterminacy is no longer the fate of those on the margins of urban space, but is the condition of "those who have the means":⁴ the experience of alienation is in fact inherent to the "haves" of the communications revolution as much—albeit in different ways—as the have-nots.

Yet rather than collapse into a pessimistic view of the postmodern as fragmentation and simulacra, the film advocates a potentially more positive vision; one in which the traffic jam is not automatically associated with the cataclysm of an individualist and consumerist society (which we can infer, say, from the films of Tati (Play Time, 1967, Trafic, 1971) or Godard (Weekend, 1967)), but the possibility of new experiences of (inter-)subjectivity. This reading will suggest that, within this context, Vendredi soir explores a more ambivalent relationship to the enforced proximate encounter of the transport breakdown; one that is staged through the latter's own semblance to the conditions and sensations of the cinematic experience in itself, Vendredi soir is a cinematically self-conscious film. From its opening scenes, it acknowledges the role of Paris within the narrative, and in turn the film's own place within the representational history of the city. As Martine Beugnet suggests, evoking the "city symphony" tradition of the 1920s (in that the film begins with a series of images of the city and city life), Denis is offering in part "a homage to and a poetic variation on Paris, taking up anew the challenge that such a worn subject . . . nocturnal Paris, represents."⁵ Where the film deviates however from its apparent predecessor is its "nocturnal" movement from dusk to dawn; a movement that runs counter to the...