Nightfall in Paris: Laure (Valérie Lemercier) finishes packing and gets in her car. Tomorrow she'll move in with her boyfriend; tonight she'll have dinner with friends. Or . . . Denis's graceful and seductive tale of a one-night affair is an ode to possibility, imagining what can happen when an ordinary woman is granted an unexpected moment of erotic opportunity. What might have been a flimsy romantic fantasy is enriched by Denis's sensitive observation of small details, and by moments when those details seem to flicker between external reality and Laure's interior perceptions. Friday Night was adapted from a novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim; Denis's characterization of the book applies equally to the adaptation: “A manner so precise, so meticulous, which contains in the same phrase both the conscious and the unconscious . . . that which is experienced and that which is desired.”