4.0 out of 5 stars
Go see the movie this book is based on, Oct 25 2004
By Andy Orrock - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: FEUX ROUGES (Paperback)
French Director Cédric Kahn turned Georges Simenon's thrilling 2003 novel into 2004's "Red Lights," now showing at selected theaters nationwide. Both book and movie build suspense to a slow boil as protagonist Antoine drinks, drives, drinks...and drnks some more. As he does, resentment towards his more-successful wife Hélène builds and uncorks with bile.
The movie's casting is what makes the adaptation of Simenon's work so successful - Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Antoine) is not exactly movie-star handsome and we've got no problem envisioning him as the office drone. Carole Bouquet as Hélène is a different issue altogether - one of France's leading stage beauties, it's no wonder her character has met with more success.
After building suspensefully, I thought book and movie ended up on a bit of unlikely happenstance - three characters drawn together through two events. There are astronomical odds of these two things happening - coming out of the movie everyone was buzzing about the unlikeliness of this, which is too bad because that contrived turn of events was preceded by some wonderful movie-making and, in the case of Simenon's novel, some excellent writing.
