Juste avant la nuit

"Just Before Nightfall" is a slow, grim, gritty, no-nonsense film. It seems as if director Claude Chabrol is saying to the viewer, "Look, don't expect to be charmed or pleased by this film -- that would be pointless for everyone. I'm interested in one thing, and one thing only: the theme of the story. Anything else would be a pointless distraction." If the viewer is willing to go along with Chabrol for the ride, Just Before Nightfall is a rich and moving film.

"Just Before Nightfall" is not a whodunnit, or even a why-dunnit. "It" -- a murder -- kind of just happened, possibly accidentally, and the question facing the characters is: what shall we do about it, now? The lead character knows he is guilty, and his desire to conceal his guilt slowly changes to a desire to confess his guilt. In this, he is like the character of Raskolnikov in Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment". More astonishing is how his friends and family respond to his confession: they are eager to forgive and forget, to deny and bury the past. And this, in turn, creates an even worse situation for the anti-hero.

1971 was dark moment, politically and culturally. Many films of that year feel like they are suffering from a hangover from the 60s: the time of exuberant exploration and new possibilities has passed, and in its place is a cosmic-scale exhaustion and hopelessness. You see this kind of industrial-strength bleakness in US films like "Five Easy Pieces", "Carnal Knowledge", "Two-Lane Blacktop". If you enjoy 70s bleakness, or, you are interested in guilt and forgiveness, or, you want to watch a director go after his message with an intensely single-minded focus -- then "Just Before Nightfall" is well worth your time.

Fascinating view of middle class degeneracy in two married couples, with the less hypocritical paying to keep the whole facade going. Masochism, murder, desire for absolution, self-sacrifice. The acting and characterisation keep surprising. Like all Chabrol films it links to others in his filmography and will benefit from more viewings.

Just Before Nightfall is another Claude Chabrol film that focuses on infidelity and again it's an intriguing drama and an excellent exploration of the human condition. The film starts with a murder - but this is clearly not the point of the film as the murder happens right at the start and it's off-screen; the main focus of this film is the guilt felt by the lead character and the whole film focuses on that and it's effect on the character as well as all the people in his life. The film is based on a novel by Edouard Atiyah, and the basic plot is rather simple and really serves only as a base for the central focus of the film. The plot focuses on Charles Masson. Charles is having an affair with Laura, the wife of his friend François. The two practises S&M with one another and Charles' life is thrown into turmoil when he accidentally strangles Laura to death. He later learns that Laura's marriage with François was not the average marriage as both had other partners, but he is still consumed by guilt and it impacts his life with his beautiful wife Hélène and their three children.

As is always the case with Chabrol's thrillers, this one is not heavy on action, suspense and tension; but that is more than made up for by the central character study. All the main characters are developed well and believable. The main character, Charles, is certainly the most interesting of the piece; the way that guilt overtakes him provides a different take on the common murderer theme and makes for a very interesting watch. As ever with Chabrol films, the production values are excellent and the performances are superb. The central cast of Michel Bouquet, François Périer and the beautiful Stéphane Audran are all perfectly placed in their roles and provide the film with a strong backbone. The film doesn't move particularly quickly but Chabrol always keeps things interesting by keeping the focus on the lead characters and the central situation. Overall, Just Before Nightfall is an intriguing and thoughtful film handling the burden of guilt and I would not hesitate to name this film as one of Chabrol's very best alongside the likes of This Man Must Die, Le Boucher and Wedding in Blood.

I love a line in this movie from the executive Masson, he said he had his house designed by a modern architect to avoid the sclerosis of becoming bourgeois. Thats exactly what I think when I see modernist furniture and architecture. It's made for future people, dysfunction-free, productive, and clairvoyant. Only that's not quite how it works out. Here we have post-bourgeois people, who find themselves, like all the best swimmers, more likely to drown. They try to reinvent morality and instead trespass into treacherous areas which the ignorant forbid themselves through superstition, in the process jettisoning the wisdom of ages.

Yes this is a Chabrol film but don't believe it's a thriller, what we have here is more along the lines of Bergman. The police in this film are portrayed as merely being obnoxious, a nuisance to everyone involved in the murder. We are constantly waiting for the detective Cavanna to disappear from the screen.

We have a view here of people whom I'm sure Matthew Barney would call almost crystalline, devoid of potentiality. The film is so awful in this respect that it almost made me glad that we only tend to live eighty years. The tired-eyed men in this movie are weighed down with disillusion and regret, waiting for the end, their successes mere dust. Just before the night, indeed. Gone are their protean days, gone are the Alpheuses of youth. It's not so much a murder thriller as an essay into death. Masson, Tellier et al would welcome the cool breeze whispering through the cypresses on the island of the dead. One startling shot from a train shows Paris in twilight, looking grubby and ready for death itself.

I think more than anything this film is about mortality. Nowhere do we see hot blood in this film, only palsy and the damp skin of the pneumonic, the husband of the mudered woman even comforts the murderer. One part of the movie that I find astonishing is when Masson sees his employee of many many years, who has just been caught embezzling by the police and is now in custody. Masson looks at him with compassion, but the old man, who is now in a sense freer than he ever has been, looks him straight in the eye and tells him to screw himself. Masks off and a bonfire of the vanities.

This film is concentrated sulphuric acid, for more of the same see Les Bonnes Femmes and Les Cousins.

This is one of the few satisfying movies Chabrol made in his long career. Here he has a convincing story that does not require complicated plot zig-zags. It is a simple story of adultery leading to death and the cover-up that follows. The acting is almost all fine--Francois Perier as the widower who expresses little sorrow for his dead wife is especially convincing; he's really acting, not just shrugging his way through a scene. Michel Bouquet has to make his guilt-ridden character (could have been created by Dostoievsky) interesting and sympathetic and mostly he does.

Couldn't this be issued on DVD?