Word: chabrols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed and Written by CLAUDE CHABROL...
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...
...these revelations and is understanding. He tells his friend François, who is forgiving too. "No one," François 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...
...Chabrol's self-appointed mission to heighten our awareness" of these struggles by presenting them in an admittedly exaggerated, stylized manner, a manner that deliberately jars against his utterly realistic mise-en-scéne. There are moments in his movies in which be lief in what one is seeing threatens to dissolve into laughter, but there are many more in which we are shocked into a new awareness that beneath the surface of ordinary-looking lives, high dramas of genuine moral dimensions are being played...