1971 film by Claude Chabrol
Just Before Nightfall (French: Juste avant la nuit) is a 1971 French crime drama film written and directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet. Based on the 1951 novel The Thin Line by Edward Atiyah, it follows a married businessman who, after killing his mistress, tries to ease his conscience by confessing to his wife and the victim's husband.
Plot
Charles Masson, a married advertising executive and father of two children, has an affair with Laura, the wife of his best friend François, an architect. During one of their sadomasochistic sex games, Charles strangles Laura. While the police do not suspect him, his conscience drives Charles to confess his crime first to his wife Hélène and later to François. Both ask him not to turn himself over to the authorities, as this would not bring Laura back to life and only destroy his family. Charles becomes gradually convinced that Laura's death was not an accident but his intention, as he felt humiliated by her. Unable to stand the strain any longer, Charles announces to Hélène that he will go to the police the next morning to make a confession. Hélène, preparing Charles' sleep medicine, deliberately gives him an overdose. His death is classified as a suicide. Some time later, Hélène sits at the beach with her children and her mother, who remarks that the children seem to get over their father's death.
Reception
Just Before Nightfall met with positive reviews by contemporary American critics. In his 1976 review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert called the film "one of Chabrol's best films on his favorite theme", whose "last half-hour provides a series of moral reverses that leaves us, too, puzzled about what's right and what's wrong".[2] Jacoba Atlas of the Los Angeles Free Press titled Chabrol "a master at showing the macabre murkiness that lies just below the surface of ordinary lives", who, with this film, has made "the definitive statement about the nightmare quality of the cowardly conscience of us all".[3] While Vincent Canby of The New York Times objected that the film "eventually becomes too schematic", he acknowledged that "the scheme has so many ambiguous twists and turns that the film continues to provoke the memory long after one has left the theater", resulting in "a comedy of a high, intelligent and dark order".[4]
David Pirie, writing for the British Time Out magazine, thought equally positive of the film, which he saw as a "tortuous, entertaining study of murder and the expiation of guilt" with "meticulous" direction, acting and script.[5]
