Juste avant la nuit
Just Before Nightfall
Claude Chabrol (1971)
A middle-aged advertising executive, married with two children, is secretly having an affair with his best friend’s wife. The sadomasochistic sex game that they play in the opening scene of Juste avant la nuit will be their last: when the woman begs to be punished, the man strangles her. He goes to a bar for a drink to steady his nerves, and bumps into the chap whose wife he’s just killed. Although he’s not suspected of the crime, he feels compelled to confess it, first to his wife, then to his widowed friend. Both advise him not to hand himself in to the police, but the guilty man can’t live with his conscience. Juste avant la nuit is one of Claude Chabrol’s best – tightly constructed, thoroughly absorbing. You might not share its misanthropic outlook or believe that things really could play out as they do in the film, but there’s no denying that Chabrol sustains a gripping contest between the imperatives of paralysing remorse and keeping up bourgeois appearances.
Chabrol’s screenplay is inspired by the British-Lebanese writer Edward Atiyah’s The Thin Line, published in 1951. And Juste avant la nuit’s opening brings Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to mind, as Jean Rabier’s camera explores a street before closing in on a single, upper-floor window, and entering the room inside to reveal the lovers there, a woman lying on a bed and a man standing nearby. The street is in Paris, where Chabrol’s protagonist, Charles Masson (Michel Bouquet), works; but most of the film’s action takes place in the wealthy Paris suburb where Charles lives with his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), and their son (Pascal Gillot) and daughter (Brigitte Périn). François Tellier (François Périer), whose wife Laura (Anna Douking) is the murder victim, is not only Charles’ friend and neighbour but also the architect who designed the Massons’ mansion. The place has an ultra-modern look – plate glass windows, split-level interiors – but Charles Masson, in the aftermath to his crime, is tormented by traditional Catholic guilty conscience, never mind that his confessions are not to a priest.
The film reunites the leads from Chabrol’s La femme infidèle (1969) with some amusing twists. Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran were husband and wife in that film, too, but she was deceiving him (the cuckolded husband went up in his wife’s estimation once he’d murdered her lover). In Juste avant la nuit Bouquet gives a brilliant performance. Charles is fully dressed, in suit and tie, when he strangles his naked mistress. Leaving the scene, he puts on a mac. By the time he arrives at the bar, he’s in dark glasses. He’s moved quickly from looking prim to creepy to almost comically suspicious, except that Bouquet is already expressing what’s going on inside plump, vaguely pompous Charles, which is no laughing matter. Watching Audran in La femme infidèle led me to complain there wasn’t enough tension between her essential screen persona and the character she was playing – that her ‘bored hauteur … works best when she can play off it: when she’s vulnerable and scared in Le boucher or unassailably charming and sociable, whatever happens, in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’. I now have to admit that, for much of Juste avant la nuit, Audran’s presence is a bit puzzling exactly because it’s a stretch to accept the impeccably soignée, apparently sophisticated Hélène as naively trusting and loyal. In the end, though, Audran’s casting makes perfect sense.
The opening scene seems to suggest that Laura is the prime mover in the sex games with Charles, perhaps intimidates him. When he first confesses to killing her, he says it was an accident but later changes his tune about that: Laura represented something degrading and destructive to the life he’d built for himself and his family. In the closing stages of the story, as he and his wife lie side by side on their twin beds, Charles explains that he’s considered suicide but recognises it would be the coward’s way out: he must go to the police next morning and confess the murder. When he asks Hélène to bring him his regular sleeping draught from the en suite bathroom, she takes the chance to affirm how devoted she is to her family’s wellbeing. She gives Charles enough laudanum not just to, as he requests, ‘let night come’ but to kill him. As a result, there’s no need for the police to be further involved. No need for the confession letter that Charles has written to his doting mother (Clelia Matania) ever to be sent. His death is recorded as suicide – maybe pressure of work had something to do with it. Charles’ family can continue to live in the manner to which they’re accustomed. In an epilogue to the main action, some months later, Hélène and her mother-in-law are on the beach at Le Touquet (in an earlier episode, Hélène and Charles stayed on their own at his mother’s seaside property there). Hélène’s daughter and son play nearby. Charles’ mother remarks that the children seem to be getting over their father’s death. Stéphane Audran’s face is impressively inscrutable.
The priority of not disturbing the status quo also makes sense of François Tellier’s behaviour – and, in due course, of François Périer’s less than overwhelmed reaction to the news that his character’s wife has been strangled to death. The Telliers’ Paris apartment was the S&M love nest. After Laura’s funeral, the housekeeper there (Marina Ninchi) tells François that she has seen Charles leaving the apartment. François tells her not to worry about that – just as he tells his friend to let sleeping dogs lie when Charles, in great agitation, confesses to him: François knew his wife was unfaithful and reckons she’s no great loss. After Charles’ death, François sends Hélène a letter, praising his late friend’s integrity and refusal to ‘live a lie’, without suggesting that his ‘suicide’ had anything to do with Laura’s murder. When he was designing the house for Charles and Hélène, François justified its modern style as a way of guarding against comfortable stagnation (‘un peu d’avant-garde au tour de soi évite la sclérose’). François’ letter of condolence seals the cover-up of the collision between Charles Masson’s ‘avant-garde’ behaviour and conventional thinking.
A clever subplot concerns Bardin (Paul Temps), the advertising agency’s accountant who, after years of loyal service, has stolen from his employers. Charles has understandable sympathy with the accountant and, when the latter is arrested by the police, voices that sympathy; in his curt response, Bardin expresses withering contempt for Charles. At the agency, too, Charles is the sober side of the business – in visually striking contrast to his creative partner, Prince (Dominique Zardi), with his toupee, multi-coloured shirts and camp mannerisms. The same Paris detective (Henri Attal) investigates both Laura’s death and Bardin’s theft. Memorably cadaverous Henri Attal is one of the standouts in the supporting cast. Another is Clelia Matania, as Charles’ mother, even though her perky theatricality makes you wonder why someone doesn’t kill her, too. There are lots of nice details. The Massons’ Black au pair (Célia) may be another expression of their determined modernity. The house’s décor includes a rather odd but very apt curtain between Charles and Hélène’s bedroom and the living room just below. Best of all is a brief daymare sequence, which picks up on an earlier conversation between the parents and their children. The little boy, Auguste, reports scratching sounds overhead at night; the family talk light-heartedly about what’s making the sounds. Auguste is sure it’s ‘a big rat’. Sometime later, his father will see that creature in his mind’s eye. As the rat reaches for a piece of cheese, a trap snaps shut on it.
27 September 2026