Juste avant la nuit

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.

A man murders his best friend's wife. Guilt leads him to confess to the crime to both his friend and his wife. They in turn forgive him his act of homicide, betrayal and infidelity. This unconditional forgiveness and lack of reproach drives him to despair.

Despite the early scenes suggesting that this could be a thriller, as is the way with Claude Chabrol's other films, the narrative of Juste Avant la Nuit goes off in an entirely different direction. It uses it's opening crime not as a springboard to a suspenseful story but as a way of examining the human condition. The murder almost becomes irrelevant as we progress through the film and witness the central character become more and more depressed as a result of the love and understanding he is shown by the people who should ordinarily hate him for the ultimate betrayal he has shown them. Like other Chabrol films, this one depicts a melancholic and tragic villain. The audience are asked again to empathize with the criminal and try to understand his angst. It's morally complex and doesn't give out any answers at all. If you're looking for a traditional crime thriller this is not it. How much you enjoy this depends on how interesting you find it's central questions. I'm on the fence.

An extraordinary film. Chabrol turns his keen eye and powers of observation to middle-class morality and psychological torment, never losing his rich sense of humor. The characters are complex and their motivations not always easy to discern. Chabrol views them caustically but also with compassion. It is part of a series of several terrific films he made between 1968 and 1973. Most fans of Chabrol consider this his pre-eminent period, and this film one of his very best.

This is the most morally exquisite of Chabrol's many explorations of the human condition. Guilt, forgiveness, revenge coexist and mutually triumph. Many of us assume these three moral stances are mutually incompatible. Chabrol balances them against each other and then fuses them together. The actors reveal their inner dilemmas with gestures more than words. Deep intentions run across surface motives. And the final gesture of this compelling film casts all that went before into another, deeper level. Of course, no deed is as simple as it seems. But few appreciate as Chabrol does here that our all too common morally mixed motives can continue to coexist to the grave. No evil deed is ever straightforward, but neither are the best ones.

Had Chabrol filmed this in the style of Bergman, this film would be a Criterion Classic. But filmed as a thriller, it has sadly failed to gain the audience and admiration it so richly deserves. It is a philosophical triumph!

Though coming from Chabrol's major phase (1967-1975), this was only recently released on DVD – and exclusively on R2 at that!; still, I had missed an incongruous Saturday morning broadcast of the film on Italian TV several years back. Ironically, even if it can lay a claim to being among the director's best-regarded efforts, I admit to having found such lesser-known Chabrol titles as DEATH RITE (1976) and ALICE OR THE LAST ESCAPADE (1977) – both of which immediately preceded this viewing – more readily satisfying…though the fact that JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL treads typically bourgeois i.e. inherently mundane territory, whereas the others were fanciful (thus essentially lightweight), may have had more to do with this than anything else!

Actually, my main quibble with the film is its overlength (due to the protagonist's wallowing in self-pity, this being basically an update of Dostoyevsky's literary classic "Crime And Punishment", during the last act); in a way, it is also a reversal of Chabrol's own LA FEMME INFIDELE (1969), with the very same stars (Michel Bouquet and Stephane Audran) no less. In the latter she is initially oblivious – and eventually forgiving – of his having learnt about her infidelity and murdered the other man, while here it is he who has a clandestine affair, kills the woman concerned and then confesses to both the wife and his best friend (husband of the deceased and played by Francois Perier), both of whom try to convince the guilt-stricken hero thereafter not to give himself up to the Police (she even taking extreme measures to this end)! Audran, still at the height of her statuesque beauty, is a particular delight and she went on to win a BAFTA award for it (shared for the actress' famously unruffled turn in that Luis Bunuel masterpiece THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE [1972]).

A subplot, then, depicts a comparable folly to the protagonist's – where the elderly and meek-looking cashier in Bouquet's firm embezzles funds to sustain his unlikely romance with a much younger woman (not that the perennially exhausted hero bore the looks of a Casanova himself but, at least, his sluttish mistress is clearly shown to be into sado-masochism). Ultimately, such ironic yet provocative (indeed quasi-surrealist) psychological nuances, are what make Chabrol's work so intriguing and quietly rewarding – more so, in fact, than perhaps any other of the "Nouvelle Vague" film-makers.