Hey Elizabeth! Nice to see you back on FB this morning, and not only you but The Red Dress too. :) As always, your photograph is excellent and in this case, The Dress stands out in bold contrast to the weakened tones of Winter. Your caption "awaiting Spring" is right on the money. I had thought we were already in Spring, with that amazing weather we had during the first half of February. But then - doggonitt! - Winter just had to make an appearance, and it looks like it's gonna stick around for a little while. I know I shouldn't be complaining. I didn't even have to wear a jacket in December or most of January and February, but for the last couple of weeks we've been freezing out here (36 at night = L.A. Cold) and the wind has been blowing and today we had non-stop rain.
Is it okay to hate Winter even when you don't get much of it? Even when you are a Cold Wimp like me?
I hope it's okay. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I understand and cut people slack who don't like the Summer heat like I do. A lot of folks can't deal with 100 degrees, which I actually enjoy, so I understand that it works both ways. My rationale - speaking just for me - is that hot may indeed be uncomfortable (for some), but cold is downright painful. For me, it gets into my bones. I'm a wimp and I'll shut up now.
But yeah, bring on the Spring already! And as your friend Justin says, "It's only 8 months until Halloween". Now that's my kind of thinking. :)
Tonight I watched a movie called "Just Before Nightfall" (1971) by director Claude Chabrol. The actual title is French, you can IMDB it if you wish, but anyway, it was good to see another Chabrol movie. This was probably my first in several years. Just offhand, I'd guess that I've seen five or six of his films, going back to the early 2000s. Claude Chabrol made a great many films from the late 50s all the way up to around 2005 or so. Some critics called him the French Alfred Hitchcock because he specialised in mysteries, but that's not accurate I don't think, because Hitchcock made big-budget, super slick thrillers, while Chabrol focused his stories on small groups of people, usually just a handful per plot, and instead of using a lot of action to tell a story, he tells it through the inner language of the few characters as they relate to one another, often in a repressed manner in interior settings. In a Chabrol film, you won't find anyone scaling Mt. Rushmore or running from a crop duster. His characters interact in ordinary ways, in houses or places of work, and they speak quietly to one another. What is unsaid is as important as what is said. Chabrol makes smaller films dealing with the hidden pathologies of the main characters. He is like Hitchcock in that his movies grip you and won't let you go, however, and also in his lack of excess. There is no fat with either filmmaker. Every scene, every frame counts to move the story forward.
In "Just Before Nightfall", the movie opens with a man and a woman in an apartment with stylish decor and garish blue wallpaper. This is the "Early 70s Look". Everything is a tad loud and overdone, a bit flowery. Chabrol uses bright white lighting to set this look in stark contrast against an "ordinary" social background. In other words, the characters are regular folks, interacting with family and friends, but they live in overly decorated surroundings that seem to either suck them in or drown them out.
At any rate, the man and woman in the garish apartment are having an affair, and not just a "normal" affair but a garish one : S&M. What is shown is nothing by modern standards, thank goodness, but we do see the woman asking the man to choke her. He doesn't want to, but she threatens to blackmail him is he doesn't. She threatens to reveal the affair to his wife. So he succumbs, and begins to choke her as per her request, but suddenly he can't stop and he kills her.
Pretty sick, but it is all done in a two minute sequence in which much is implied and little is shown. Thank goodness for directors like Claude Chabrol. Well, the man who kills the woman is an ordinary man, an advertising executive. He has an adoring wife and three children, and a best friend who lives close by, an architect who designed his ultra modern house.
But the only problem is that it was the architect's wife who he was having an affair with. And yes, I can occasionally end my sentence with a preposition or whatever I ended it with. Sorry.
But what happens is that, 1) The guy was having an affair with his best friend's wife. 2) She was a nutcase who was into sexual violence. 3) He reluctantly went along with it but wound up killing her.
Surprisingly, this does not seem to bother anyone. The French police are on the case, and if you know the French police, from the history of movies, you know that they are right up there with LAPD as folks you do not wanna mess with. But here, the French police can't seem to solve the case. The man begins to realise that he is gonna get away with murder, and he starts to unravel. His conscience is bothering him, to ever elevating extremes. Slowly, he feels the need to confess. Not to the police, but to his wife, and even to his friend..... the man whose wife he killed. Such is the power of his guilt.
But lo and behold, neither wife nor friend is very much troubled by his confession. Wife loves him too much, she represents "Wife as Saint", and the friend really doesn't care. He knew of his own wife's secret life with other men, and he values his friendship with her killer to much to turn him in.
All of this begins to drive the guilty man to extreme depression. He wants to be judged, to be tried, convicted and sentenced, but his wife and friend keep talking him out of confessing to the police. Finally he is on the verge of collapse. And I will leave it at that, for I have already told you way too much.
"Just Before Nightfall" is one tight little movie, a textbook example of how to make a psychological thriller that exists only in the small world of a few principal characters.
I give it Two Big Thumbs Up, and I was motivated afterward to make a Library search for more Claude Chabrol films. And I found a few, too! Give 'em a couple weeks to arrive and then we'll watch 'em and review 'em.
Until then, we will wait for Spring, and "drive the cold winter away", as the song says.
See you in the morning. xooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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