Extérieur, nuit (1980)

Extérieur, nuit is a French romantic film drama first released in 1980, directed by Jacques Bral.  The film stars Christine Boisson, André Dussollier, Gérard Lanvin, Jean-Pierre Sentier and Marie Keime.  It has also been released under the title: Exterior Night.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Hoping to make a fresh start, Léo, a jazz musician, takes up temporary residence with his friend Bony, a young writer who is struggling to get his work published.  One evening, Léo strikes up an acquaintance with a woman taxi driver, Cora; in spite of her impulsive and moody temperament, he cannot help being attracted to her.  On the spur of the moment, Cora invites Léo to make love to her.  When Bony meets Cora, he too finds her irresistible, but he lacks Léo’s self-confidence to make his move.  Cora is not a woman that any man can possess readily.  She is like a wild animal, a creature that revels in its freedom.  Will either Léo or Bony be able to tame her...?

There are not many films that evoke the essence of the early 1980s more vividly than Extérieur, nuit, a film which could just about pass for a French version of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), in tone if not in substance.  This was the second feature to be directed by the somewhat unprolific but nonetheless highly regarded filmmaker Jacques Bral; it was also the first he made for Les Films Noirs, the film production company he founded in 1978 with Jean-Paul Leca and Julien Lévi.  Combining elements of film noir and cinéma vérité, Extérieur, nuit appears to both epitomise and subvert the Cinéma du look aesthetic which helped to rejuvenate French cinema in the 1980s; superficially it resembles some of the early films made by Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix, but there is more depth beneath the surface, and a distinctive identity that sets it apart from any other French film of the decade.  

The film benefits from its excellent trio of leading players.  Looking scarily like a Gallic version of Robert De Niro, Gérard Lanvin distinguishes himself with a performance that would have been a gift to any auteur filmmaker.  Lanvin’s presence alone is sufficient to give the film its hyper-realist feel and is what leads the spectator to regard the film not as a piece of cinema fiction but as a kind of wildlife documentary, one that depicts the human animal existing in the darker precincts of the urban jungle (i.e. the backstreets of Paris in the 1980s).  This is not to belittle the contributions of Lanvin’s co-stars Christine Boisson and André Dussollier, who are both equally deserving of praise.  Boisson’s Cora epitomises the classic femme fatale and the modern, independently minded woman, yet we can also glimpse the fractured psyche beneath the surface and also the frustration of someone who finds it hard to live with male chauvinism (sexual discrimination was still pretty rampant in the 1980s).  The fact that Cora is the taxi driver is itself a bold assertion of female supremacy (like Margaret Thatcher, she has to be tougher than a man to do the job as well as a man), something which is also reflected in the dominant position she takes in her amorous relationships.  By contrast, Dussollier gives a fair imitation of the castrated male - lacking Lanvin’s primeval animal drive and the stamina needed to take on the Coras of this world, he looks set to become a casualty of Darwinian selection.

If Martine Scorsese and Maurice Pialat had ever worked together on a film, it would look something like this - a sombrely introspective exploration of the delicate relationships between three fragile characters living on the margins of society, each uncertain of his or her identity.  The film’s haunting jazz score and its seductively photographed nocturnal location sequences convey a melancholy, a sense of aimless drifting through an existential void, which is so redolent of the era in which it is set.  Extérieur, nuit is slow-paced and lacking in narrative content but it is compelling, profound and authentic in a way that much of 1980s French cinema isn’t.  The film was digitally remastered in 2009 and has recently been re-released, to widespread critical acclaim.  Watching it today is like stepping through a doorway and finding yourself back in the cultural and economic wasteland that was the early 1980s - a chilling but strangely comforting experience.

© James Travers 2011

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A great French noir. A classic of its kind, to be released in a remasterised version in France in January 2010.
Campbell William (London, UK) 

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