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Overview
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.
Synopsis
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...?
Film Review
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 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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) What do you think of this film? Related links
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Credits
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