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“Friday Night” isn’t so much about a romantic encounter or a chance fling as it is about the emotional liberation of a lost, unhappy young woman.  In co-writer/director Claire Denis’ words, Laure (played serenely by Valerie Lemercier) is “between two worlds.”  Indeed, Laure is at a critical juncture in her life.  When Denis’ movie opens, we find her packing up her Parisian apartment quietly, methodically, like a dutiful prisoner preparing to head off to her new cell.  That new cell is her boyfriend’s apartment into which, come morning, she plans to relocate.

The movie’s opening scenes, so dreamily quiet, deliberate, meditative, lingering over the subtle sounds, rhythms and textures of Laure’s surroundings, prepare us for a most rewarding cinematic journey.  That journey begins in Laure’s car as she sets out for dinner at a friend’s.  She finds her way choked with traffic due, no surprise here, by a Parisian transit strike.  Inching along, Laure finds comfort in her last, quiet night of “freedom” before offering a ride to Jean (Vincent Lindon), a roguishly handsome man stranded for lack of public transport.  The two strike up a pleasant rapport, but, in Jean, Laure finds all that she desires in herself.  An unspoken, simmering attraction develops amidst nothing more than polite exchanges and the dull groan of traffic.

Writers Denis and Emmanuele Bernheim (drawing from her novel) reject the obligatory patter and backstory revelations that just-met romantic partners are saddled with, opting for a riskier, purely cinematic approach.  Their script, and Agnes Godard’s intimate camerawork, finds its greatest dramatic resource not in effusive dialogue or action—there’s surprisingly little of either in the movie—but from the telling gesture, glance and look.  The gentle expressiveness in the leads’ performances lends “Friday Night” its graceful, unforced appeal.  When passions do break through, Denis’ camera, rather than gaze on voyeuristically, clings lovingly to their bodies, to whispers, scents and contours.  The actors too opt for a refreshingly muted approach, erotic without being bump-and-grind obvious.

As delicately as night turns to day, Denis depicts Laure’s transformation, crafting in the process a lovely tone poem about a woman’s emerging self-assurance.  The grace note of “Friday Night’s” final shot is something only a filmmaker of Denis’ skill and humanism could have managed, inviting us to speculate longingly about Laure’s future, surprising us with how much we’ve actually come to care.

Grade: A

Directed by: Claire Denis
Written by: Claire Denis, Emmanuele Bernheim
Cast: Valerie Lemercier, Vincent Lindon, Helene de Saint-Pere

Alexander Sokurov’s “Father and Son,” his second part to a proposed trilogy that began with 1997’s “Mother and Son,” doesn’t so much push the boundaries of cinema as immerse itself in its deepest, most subliminal, depths. Like its predecessor, “Father and Son” takes, as its hook, the tortured dynamics of the parent-child relationship. Here, a son’s bond with his father is strained by his desire to depart and create his own life. The son, however, must first reconcile with his resentment over his motherless childhood and his grudging loyalty to his father.

In Sokurov’s hands, these characters feel as light as air, as if summoned by the storyteller from some vague dream. Indeed, what makes his movie so appealing, even thrilling, is how he breathes cinema into each frame, and invokes a sense of otherworldliness. In a literal sense, “Father and Son’s” message has no particular weight, but, as cinema, it echoes its yearnings by appealing to some darkly sensitive corner of our minds stimulated only in deep sleep.

Alexander Burov’s ethereal cinematography places us in a rooftop flat in an unspecified European port city. Here, a widower (Andrey Schetinin) shares an especially strong bond with his teenage son (Aleksey Neymyshev). The father has never healed from the long-ago death of his wife, a woman who still holds sway over his heart. The son, meanwhile, struggles with nightmares of killing his father (as Oedipal a hint as you’ll ever get), and with committing to a local girl.

The father dotes over him and beams with pride as his son, following in his footsteps, goes through the rigors of his military schooling. He senses, though, that their separation is inevitable and that he must overcome his mourning and renew his life with another woman. Hence, the two find themselves on the brink of daunting changes, something Sokurov physicalizes by placing their drama on the precarious roofs and ledge-spanning planks of their apartment house.

Throughout the movie, one son or another questions his father’s authority or else a father’s memory haunts the son. For instance, the son’s friend — in one of the most rapturous sequences to appear in any movie — wonders why his father divorced his mother, why he took to alcoholism and abandoned them. The sequence is steeped in the movie’s trademark amber glow and in the hushed sounds of the tram, the city’s cobbled streets and a muted mix of electronic and classical strains, underscoring the movie’s theme of generational collision. It’s a moment that makes you take notice of how, with lyrical precision, a movie’s visuals and sounds can make it sensually transcendent.

“Father and Son” is a cinematic tone poem that, for all its pleasures, can also be frustratingly obtuse. The tension and reconciliation between the father and son are never conveyed pointedly enough to move us because Sokurov is too preoccupied with how to merely insinuate meaning from the gentle drift of his story. The movie, hence, skips and floats in the shallows without ever boldly speaking its mind. Never mind, though, because Sokurov is too seductive a fabulist for conventional nit-picking. His movie is so physically rich and alive that, for a hit of pure cinema, you could no better in this blunt-edged summer-movie season than to spend a few moments reveling in its high.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Aleksandr Sokurov
Written by: Sergei Potepalov
Written: Andrei Shchetinin, Aleksei Neymyshv, Alksandr Razbash, Fyodor Lavrov, Marina Zusukhina