Claude Chabrol, one of Mid Century Cinema’s favorite directors, is said to have made close to seventy feature films. We’ve only seen fifty-four of them, but very likely our favorite is Just Before Nightfall. One of the great films of the seventies, it premiered in Paris on March 31, 1971. Arriving midway in a period of astonishing creativity and productivity for the New Wave auteur (a dozen films from 1968 to 1975), Nightfall marked the end of the “Charles and Hélène” cycle of intense personal dramas. These included some outstanding films: La Femme Infidele (1969), The Beast Must Die (1969), and Le Boucher (1970). Chabrol’s then wife, Stéphane Audran, played four different Hélènes, including the OH, (original Hélène) in Unfaithful Wife, opposite one of the director’s regular (and favorite) collaborators, Michel Bouquet. They are paired again in Nightfall; a very fine François Périer (François), rounds out the leading players of this particularly innovative morality tale. Chabrol wrote the screenplay, and the rest of his usual production team was on hand: cinematographer Jean Rabier, editor Jacques Gaillard, production designer Guy Littaye, and composer Pierre Jansen.
Chabrol was often called “the French Hitchcock,” and not without cause. With Eric Rohmer (when both were still critics for Cahiers du Cinéma), he wrote the first serious book about Hitchcock’s films; an early masterpiece, Les Bonnes Femmes, has some very Hitchcockian moments (one of which brings to mind François Truffaut’s observation that Hitchcock shoots his love scenes like murders and his murders like love scenes); Femme Infidele straight out lifts crucial shots from Psycho and Vertigo. (Let’s call them homages, and they do abound—the first shot in Nightfall will look awfully familiar to Hitchcock obsessives). And of all the New Wavers, only Chabrol made commercial thrillers, and he was the most likely among them to traffic in murder (certainly no Charles and Hélène story would be complete without one). The two directors also shared a macabre sense of humor. Nevertheless, the comparison is facile, and obscures more than it reveals. In particular, consider that most Hitchcockian theme: an innocent man on the run, wrongly accused. In stark narrative and existential contrast, Chabrol’s protagonists are almost invariably guilty (or at least never innocent), and are commonly under-pursued. (Many learned observers associate this with Fritz Lang. This has never leapt out to us, but Lang is another off-cited influence, including by Chabrol himself.)
Just Before Nightfall is the definitive statement of this very Chabrolian take on guilt. As the film opens, poor Charles is in a bit of a pickle. He has just killed his lover, probably accidentally—a kinky sex encounter gone wrong, and she was an enthusiastic participant and clearly the provocateur. But what would Freud say? Charles was obviously harboring profoundly mixed feelings about the relationship, and, um, those were his hands around her neck. We will never know for certain what actually happened—and neither for that matter, will Charles.
Our hero stumbles out of the hotel (leaving evidence and perhaps a witness behind?) and finds his way into a local bar. (Bouquet’s performance, understated and impeccable throughout, especially brilliant here—he behaves exactly the way you think you might in such a situation). Then things get interesting. In a (sure, Hitchcockian) passage, Charles bumps into his best friend François, and the two have an anxiety-filled encounter (at least for Charles and the audience). A few hours later it will be François who needs a friend—his wife has been found murdered. Yes, exactly.
Unlike most of us, who would probably have been picked up within the hour, Charles, it would seem, appears to be above suspicion. He’s a well-respected man, and the house he lives in with Hélène and the children, designed by François with some nifty avant-garde touches, suggests not opulence but a certain level of comfort. (Chabrol underscores this privilege with a deftly handled and not to be underestimated subplot.) But going unpunished has its downside, especially if you imagine yourself as a decent fellow living in an ordered universe (a similar theme would subsequently be interrogated by Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors).
Thus the tantalizing central thread of Just Before Nightfall: Charles finds himself with an overwhelming urge to confess. In oblique, moving encounters with François and Hélène he is shopping, not for forgiveness, but for accountability and condemnation. He even more than flirts with the police (listen to the way he says “and now you have mine” in a seemingly innocent question about fingerprints). But it is all for naught. And desperate times finally call for desperate measures. In the end, however, that ultimate measure is not the one you quite expect, in this impeccably shot, invariably entertaining movie with something to say about intimate friendship, marital compromise, the invisible guardrails of implicit societal norms, and the power of guilt. Otherwise known as A Claude Chabrol film.
