Low Lights (2009)

Tadas and Laura have been married for a long time, but they still have no children. They both work at an insurance company, recently moved into a new apartment that they are still renovating, and bought a new car on installments. It seems they have already achieved a lot in life, yet their relationship has dwindled to little more than cold formality. Tadas is indifferent to his job and spends his evenings channel-surfing, while Laura keeps climbing the career ladder and stays later and later at work, just so she can come home later. One ordinary workday, Tadas happens to run into his former classmate. Linas once emigrated, hoping to earn better money, but now, as he puts it, he has been back on vacation for a couple of months. Introducing himself as an independent architect, Linas offers to help Tadas with the never-ending apartment renovations, and that same evening invites him to stay out late around the city. Monday night. Instead of sitting in a bar over a glass of beer, Linas suggests driving through the city streets and gradually introduces Tadas to the rituals of “night driving”: taking the same roads as on the way to work, buying only two liters of gas so they have to stop at another gas station again, speeding along dark suburban streets with the headlights off… At first, Tadas finds it more silly and strange than romantic. But things change when the men meet a striking stranger. Linas is captivated, while Tadas is stunned: the mysterious beauty is his wife, Laura… This is a story about people condemned to loneliness and trapped in the routines of modern big-city life, longing for closeness, romance, and sincerity. Their invented nighttime driving rituals prompt them to create a new world. The familiar, banal maze of streets reveals new and unfamiliar sensations, human and warm. The nighttime journey is as brief as a blink, yet it is what lets them immerse themselves in adventures they have never experienced before, and discover forgotten love and hope… Even if only for one short summer night…