MARRIAGE À LA MORTE

REVIEWED - RED LIGHTS (FEUX ROUGES): Further evidence of the continuing affection that French film-makers hold for Alfred Hitchcock comes with this obtuse, captivating thriller by Cédric Kahn, director of the disturbing serial killer movie Roberto Succo.

Using those bits of Debussy's Nuages which sound most like Bernard Hermann and featuring a scene in which the hero is abandoned at a crossroads while a plane circles above, Red Lights, like so many of Hitch's best works, focuses on an ordinary man who is, for uncertain reasons, drawn into an unfamiliar world of violent confrontation.

Based, as all French thrillers should be, on a story by Simenon, the film tells the story of Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a dour insurance worker, and his unsatisfactory relationship with his better looking, more successful wife, Hélène (Carole Bouquet). It is summer and the couple are driving south from Paris to pick up their children from camp.

Antoine, whose feelings of inadequacy are beginning to dominate his life, is already pretty tipsy when the journey begins and, running into every bar he passes, gets steadily more so as they move deeper into the country. They bicker relentlessly and eventually Hélène, furious at her husband's weakness, storms off towards the train station when he makes one too many stops to refuel (himself).

Antoine gets to the station just too late and, feeling even more sorry for himself than usual, piles into several more bars before eventually rubbing up against a large man who may or may not be an escaped convict.

There are flavours of Kafka in the way the story focuses on a small man assailed by incomprehensibly frightening events, and the sheer absurdity of the situation Antoine eventually finds himself in almost nudges the picture towards the surreal. Indeed, the strangely sanguine conclusion suggests that more of this film may take place in Antoine's subconscious than the script explicitly states.

But the film is most notable for its superbly sustained atmosphere of menace and unease. If nothing else, it is worth seeing for the exquisitely impressive title sequence - workers scurrying round modernist architecture - which, though different in style, bears comparison with the best work of Saul Bass.