Liège-born, a traveler but long resident in Switzerland and once lover of Josephine Baker, former newspaperman Georges Simenon wrote hundreds of volumes that have sold six-hundred million copies in nearly half-a-hundred languages. “I’m already 29 and I’ve only published 277 books,” he explained in 1932, after already having created several fiction detectives but only just recently the Inspector Maigret who would make him famous. With a number of his books filmed and even remade, for Gide “perhaps the greatest and most truly ‘novelistic’ novelist in France today” is most associated with labyrinthine prose detection, so that not many are aware that his work also encompassed several dozen “psychological novels,” “romans durs” of seedy setting and characters.

Co-scripted by himself, Cédric Kahn’s Red Lights/Feux Rouges is the newest Simenon adaptation. Admirable in its cinematographic conception and score from Debussy’s Nocturnes and for much of the way in its plot development, the film leaves a couple loose ends too many, drops unrealized hints, and betrays its premise to descend into a reunited one-big-happy-family ending. Noting that the source has the whole story actually happening, the director maintains that his movie is an improvement, in that ambiguity is introduced and that only one of several possible interpretations is “that it’s all a dream.” Maybe so, but aside from a cheap-shot nightmare, too many minor characters introduce aspects that need explaining but are ignored.

After fifteen years of marriage, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and attractive Dakar-born Hélène (Carole Bouquet) Dunan are at each other the little time they are together. A successful corporate lawyer at forty, she gets home late and even then conducts cell-phone business, and this -- and not his drinking -- is the heart of the problem; for while not a breadloser, he feels unheroic and unappreciated by contrast as well as jealous of her male coworkers and even mutual acquaintances.

Tensions evident, they set out cross-country for their two children at summer camp. August is Europe’s month-long vacation, traffic is horrendous, the couple bicker about routes, are forced to detour and get lost off the motorway, while, lying about needing gas or a pit stop, he gets further soused and quietly belligerent. He refuses to let her drive, though his recklessness behind the wheel is nerve-wracking, so she threatens to continue alone and let him catch up by train. He pockets the ignition keys, stays too long for more scotch and beer, and she vanishes, leaving behind a “taking the train” note.

Impatient of roadblocks put up to catch a dangerous escapee from Le Mans prison, the husband madly tries to intercept her but stops again for a few relaxing drinks and unburdens himself to a taciturn, very tall young man (Vincent Deniard) with an unseen wrist tattoo and impaired or crippled arm who first disappears and then bums a ride.

These three characters are it, with the scar-faced hitchhiker in darkness and she, Hélène, physically absent for the entire center but nevertheless present in the common face of an increasingly rumpled Darroussin. With night road sequences improbably done in a studio -- “I want the road to look red” -- the film is uniquely successful in conveying real journey by not focusing on the gunmetal Rover from outside but on facial expression and on roads, dotted lines, policemen, signs and countryside as seen from a driver’s eye.

Matters come to a violent head between Antoine and the passenger, through the former’s fault, although he also does not claim his ironic hero’s credit when the opportunity arises. Assuming, again, that it is not a dream in the first place, a connection will be established among the three as the missing wife is searched for. Unwisely, ten minutes’ worth of the process is assigned to continuous one-sided phone calls to various unrealistically informative officials, while a dense or perhaps simply drained Antoine is prompted by a bright helpful waitress (Carline Paul).

The highway and byway feel and conjugal squabbling are believable in pointing toward the advertised thriller in the Claude Chabrol or Hitchcock mode, but a “lightness [of a] . . . generous ending” preceded by some sloppiness in realization fatally weaken the mystery, and unresolved issues finish it off. 

(Released by Wellspring; not rated by MPAA.)