Sex, violence, comedy, surreal magic? That's traffic jams in the movies, writes Geoffrey Macnab
Flashback to 1995. It's a cold, dark Friday night in Paris and the city is gridlocked. The traffic has ground to a halt. Thanks to the transport strike, the Metro is closed and there are no public buses. More vehicles than ever are on the roads, but none are moving. Frustrated drivers are honking their horns and cursing. Somewhere in the middle of this column of near-stationary cars sits a shy young woman, strangely unperturbed at being caught in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in recent French history. In the safety of the driving seat, she is listening to music and looking at the chaos around her.
So begins Claire Denis's new film, Vendredi Soir. There's nothing more boring than a traffic jam, but Laure (Valerie Lemercier) seems almost to welcome the boredom. As she peers through the car window at the antics of the passers-by, she seems more spectator than driver. Watching her, it's hard not to be reminded of German critic Walter Benjamin's remark: "Boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience." When a stranger, Jean (Vincent Lindon), climbs into her car, she not only gives him a lift, the two soon retreat to a hotel to make love. So far, so French.
"A strike maybe is a good way to meet someone," Denis suggests. "In such a traffic jam, there are two possibilities. You either fight or you surrender."
Laure, it is clear, has taken the latter option.The film is shot in hazy, dream-like fashion, with hardly a word of dialogue. The hypnotic music - by Denis's regular collaborators, the Tindersticks - and Agnes Godard's incongruously romantic photography of the city at a standstill ensure that audiences share Laure's tranquillity rather than the frustrations of the other drivers.
It seems typically French to use a traffic jam as the starting-point for a love affair; this is certainly not the attitude to gridlock you'll find in any Hollywood movie. Compare the beginning of Vendredi Soir with the opening scenes of Joel Schumacher's 1993 feature, Falling Down, and all the old clichés about the differences between European and US culture come into focus. Falling Down also begins with a traffic jam, but D-Fens (Michael Douglas) is less philosophical than Laure. As a fly buzzes at his windscreen, he grows tenser and angrier, eventually leaping out of his car and embarking on what turns out to be a day of violent mayhem. The traffic jam turns a stressed office-worker into a baseball bat-wielding psychopath.
Denis isn't the first French director to find lyricism in traffic jams, nor is Schumacher the only Hollywood director to use one to denote hell on earth. They often prompt film-makers to feats of formal ingenuity.
Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) boasts a famous tracking-shot lasting several minutes, in which we see kids running around, men playing cards on the hood of their car, someone peeing at the side of the road and, finally, as critic James Monaco memorably describes it, "the cause of the jam, a majestic, multiple crash: a collage of colour, crumpled steel, broken bodies and blood".
D-Fens would surely have found it therapeutic to watch the final moments of Jacques Tati's surreal 1967 comedy, Playtime. Tati, like Denis, seems to have decided there is something carnivalesque about being stuck in traffic. One of the film's last sequences shows an army of vehicles, bumper to bumper, driving round a roundabout at microscopic speed. It's an incongruously happy moment. In among the cars, buses, vans and motorbikes, there's an ice-cream van and a cement-mixer painted bright red and white. This sequence, Tati's biographer David Bellos wrote, "transforms a mere traffic jam into an epiphany of reconciliation . . . the whole fleet of vehicles caught in the circle stops and starts to the eye-rhythm established, and a loud fairground hurdy-gurdy on the soundtrack synchronises all the movements into an unexpected, ravishingly beautiful and joyous merry-go-round".
Traffic jams can be useful storytelling tools. In his 1970 film, Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson staged one to let the audience know that his freewheeling, blue-collar anti-hero, Robert (Jack Nicholson), was not what he appeared. In one sequence on a Californian road, a hungover Robert and his best friend are driving to work. The cars in front and behind are at a standstill. Eventually, Robert jumps out of his car and climbs on to the back of a truck in front of him, which is carrying a grand piano. He pulls off the dust-sheet and starts hitting the keyboard. Eventually, he sits down and plays properly. Though the music is drowned out by engines and horns, it's clear he's a virtuoso. The scene underlines what we already know, namely that he's a non-conformist without the patience to sit in line, but it also reveals another side of him without expository dialogue: the oil worker is a middle-class musician who once studied at a conservatory.
While Ferrara and Rafelson make ingenious use of traffic jams for dramatic reasons, Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson sets his entire 2000 movie, Songs From the Second Floor, during one. Described by Andersson as a "slice-of-life pastiche of modern urban society", this is a deadpan, dystopian comedy in 46 cryptic scenes. As the characters struggle with domestic and professional problems, their anguish is exacerbated by the gridlock paralysing the city. Perhaps Andersson is the supreme bard of movie traffic jams. He is often accused of being a cold-hearted formalist, but his experience directing advertisements for companies such as Volvo and Citroën certainly taught him how to catch a long tailback on camera.
In Vendredi Soir, Denis manages to make a traffic jam seem magical. In Falling Down, D-Fens regarded one as yet another way of oppressing the little man. In Andersson's film, there's no explanation, no sense of where anybody is going or where they've come from. Traffic jams, Andersson would doubtless argue, are perfect symbols for the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern urban life. His unnamed city is inching inexorably closer to disaster; the longer the gridlock lasts, the quicker it will get there.
Vendredi Soir is on at the IFC from next Friday