Forgiveness of Sins

By JAY COCKS

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL

Directed and Written by CLAUDE CHABROL

Forgiveness is almost a matter of etiquette, bestowed casually among members of polite society.

Absolution, even for murder, is easy: it is practically a social grace.

Feeling guilty is a faux pas, like hiring the wrong decorator or choosing an inappropriate wine for dinner.

This is the upper middle class of French society, portrayed here by Claude Chabrol with harrowing humor, and its overriding principle is that no shock waves are tolerated. Just Before Nightfall, an intelligent and wholly unsparing dark comedy, concerns an advertising executive named Charles (Michel Bouquet) who murders his mistress. Charles discovers--as did Hickey, under rather more intense circumstances in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh--that what is insupportable is the weight of pardon.

Act of Passion. Charles has made the mistake of committing a crime in a milieu where nothing much matters. He himself remains largely dead to the world, so that when he strangles his mistress (Anna Douking) during a bizarre sex game it is difficult initially to determine whether the killing was an accident or an unaccustomed act of passion. He is rather gloomy afterward, as his best friend Franc,ois (Franc,ois Perier) duly notes. But Charles barely manages a look of concern when Franc,ois hears that his wife has met with an "accident." It is Franc,ois's wife who was Charles' mistress. Charles sits uneasily at home, toying with his dinner, forcing himself to eat dessert and play a game of Scrabble with his wife and children. He even has to take several drops of laudanum to sleep.

The seriousness of his situation rests with ever-increasing firmness on Charles' modishly tailored shoulders. On the way to his dead mistress's funeral, he silently mouths a confession in the back seat of a car. A police inspector confides to him that the murder may never be solved. With mounting distress, Charles tells his wife (Stc,phane Audran) about his affair and the killing. She considers these revelations and is understanding. He tells his friend Franc,ois, who is forgiving too. "No one," Franc,ois explains, "is guilty of what happens in a nightmare." After all this, Charles can turn only to the police. It would not be fair to the pitiless symmetry Chabrol has established to reveal what happens after this point, but the film ends with a fine, fierce flourish.

Just Before Nightfall is among the very best of Chabrol's movies. It is cunning and deadly, made with a measured simplicity of style which suits the ruefully ironic rigors of the theme. Attempts to delineate a sort of arctic moral climate, to deal with shallow people and the deadness of lives, frequently end up either being superficial themselves or strangling on their own rage. Chabrol's particular achievement here is his ability to keep his distance and still preserve his passion.

Jay Cocks

When Claude Chabrol himself was young --not even 20-- he weighed the stuff of life and death in his hands (healing potion or deadly poison?) and cared little for the difference. So four times in a row he flunked his elementary pharmacy course, and his druggist father agreed Claude might as well go into the movies. At 45, Chabrol still cannot decide on the difference. He seeks neither villains nor heroes, and even suggests they may be interchangeable.

"I ask audiences to contemplate a character, not identify with him," Chabrol comments. His striving to keep the audience at a safe, almost dispassionate remove from the action is directly contrary to the methods of a film maker with whom he is frequently compared, Alfred Hitchcock. Chabrol admires Hitchcock (and with fellow Director Eric Rohmer once wrote a book about him) but insists that similarities in their work go little farther than the large number of corpses littered across the screen. A more significant influence was Fritz Lang (M), whose elaborate, often carbolic melodramas taught Chabrol "not to identify."

Cool Wit. Besides giving his best movies a sort of cool inexorability, Chabrol's characteristic distance allows his wit to stand clear. The director discusses matters of homicidal compulsion with the casual, slightly mock sophistication of a practiced host planning a party. "Crime in film adds a little spice," Chabrol confides. "It makes the audience feel they haven't entirely wasted their evening. I love seeing blood in films. I detest petty criminals, but what I love is razors cutting throats in an atmosphere extremement distingue."

Married for more than ten years to the elegant Stephane Audran--leading lady in Le Boucher, Les Biches, and a great many of her husband's other films besides Just Before Nightfall--Chabrol has three sons, a three-floor town house in a Paris suburb and a still unfinished country home in the south of France, as well as an unabashed attachment to the hearty pleasures of bourgeois life. He is a gourmand, readily admits to drinking excessively, and confesses a connoisseur's appreciation of comely women. Even so, he insists that he remains "resolutely monogamous. Perhaps it is conventional, but that's the way it is."

This energetic commitment to the good life has fueled Chabrol's exploration of the hypocritical perimeters of class morality. "What I am trying to show is that there are no laws, no rules," he claims. "If you say murder is bad, I say don't be sure. If you say a person is a monster, I say don't count on it." Many of his movies tend to be of a piece, like a jigsaw recut to fit different ways and work in various combinations. Chabrol considers Just Before Nightfall (made in 1971) to be a companion piece to La Femme Infidele (1969) in which the wife cheats on her husband. Only their crises have been inverted, turned inside out, "like shuffling cards," as the director says.

Of Chabrol's nearly 30 movies, most were dealt from the same deck. He is now thinking of moving on and enlarging his scale. His next project, tentatively titled The St. Petersburg-Cannes Express and starring Julie Christie, will take him back to the Belle Epoque and matters of radical politics. Criminality among the middle classes will be forsaken. Says Chabrol: "There's not much more to say about it, is there?" It is a statement he makes with an air of personal pride.

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