Les Amours finissent à l'aube (1953)
Directed by Henri Calef

Film Review

Henri Calef may not have been the most prolific of film directors - he made only around a dozen films in three decades - but he brought a distinctive flair to his work that readily sets him apart from his more commercially astute contemporaries of the 1940s and '50s.  Throughout the 1930s, he had had a long apprenticeship, working as an assistant to such luminaries as Pierre Chenal, André Berthomieu and Jacques de Baroncelli, whose individual styles would greatly influence his own.  Calef's directorial career began in a highly promising vein, with one immense box office hit - the impressive war film Jéricho (1946) - and a critically acclaimed literary adaptation, Les Chouans (1947).  Subsequent success proved elusive for him and today he is tragically all but forgotten, along with the bulk of his idiosyncratic work.

Les Amours finissent à l'aube (a.k.a. Fatal Affair) is one of Henri Calef's more interesting cinematic offerings, an effective hodgepodge of love story, psychological drama and investigative policier that explores the power of obsessive love (both destructive and redemptive) from a highly unusual angle - very different from what we find in the director's earlier realist melodrama La Maison sous la mer (1947).  In this original story, conceived by screenwriter Marcel Rivet, it is an all-consuming compulsion to protect the woman he loves - his chronically fragile wife - that drives a man first to murder his mistress and then to hold out against a brutal onslaught from a police inspector who is pathologically set on sending him to the scaffold.  As befits the grim subject matter, Calef skilfully applies the tropes of classic film noir - in particular stark high-contrast lighting (a forte of the great cinematographer Henri Alekan) - to create an intense brooding drama of unutterable bleakness.

Georges Marchal heads a distinguished cast, turning in one of his finer performances as the taciturn, emotionally repressed and highly ambiguous central character Didier.  For most of the film, Marchal appears distant and expressionless, his character's inner turmoil (revealed in only a few fleeting shots) contained by an iron will to prevent any harm coming to his hyper-vulnerable wife, played with harrowing conviction by Françoise Christophe.  As Didier's secret life is gradually revealed to us, we are at first wrong-footed into thinking he is a philandering scoundrel, casually cheating on his wife and covering his tracks with a carefully woven web of lies.  After disposing of the body of the woman he killed (albeit accidentally), we see him driving through the rain with an expression on his face that can easily be read as malignant triumph.

That Didier is in fact on the side of the angels, that he is in essence a good man driven to the bad by events beyond his control, becomes increasingly apparent as the drama unfolds.  In the end, taken to the limits of endurance by outrageous fortune and even more outrageous police misconduct, he is the character with whom we have the greatest sympathy - with the possible exception of the older sister Clémence who goes out of her way to protect him (a role in which Suzanne Dehelly excels and very nearly steals the film).  It is the police - specifically the hard-bitten, overly smug police inspector Lotte (Jacques Castelot) - who turn out to be the villains of the piece.  It isn't justice that motivates the custodians of law in this film, but a remorseless drive for social retribution - a crime has been committed and so a culprit must be found, condemned and executed (murder being a capital offence at the time).

When it becomes clear to the self-aggrandising Lotte that there is insufficient evidence to convict the obvious suspect, he adopts a different tack, piling pressure on the clearly doomed Didier to try to wring a confession out of him.  Of course, Didier's desperate need to protect his wife provides him with the resilience he needs to hold out against this despicable display of psychological warfare, and once his wife is out of harm's way he doesn't hesitate for a moment to do the right thing and confess his guilt.

Love and honour triumph over the baser motives of professional pride and revenge-lust - a formula that would provide the basis for many subsequent classic French policiers that tend to place the supposed criminal on a higher moral plane than his police persecutors.  Les Amours finissent à l'aube is a darkly compelling piece that follows a run of similarly styled noir-tinted dramas in which director Henri Calef meticulously probes the darker precincts of the human soul.  Others that are well worth seeing include Les Eaux troubles (1949), La Souricière (1950) and Ombre et Lumière (1951).

Film Synopsis

Didier Guéret is in charge of marketing for a large automobile company based in Paris.  He takes advantage of his frequent business trips to other cities across Europe to pursue short-lived amorous liaisons with various women he comes into contact with.  None of these affairs means anything to Didier (who takes the precaution of hiding his real name from his mistresses), as there is only one woman in his life: his wife Alberte.  His would have been the perfect marriage were it not for the fact that Alberte is afflicted with a serious heart condition that could proof fatal if she were to be subjected to any form of anxiety.

Leone Fassler is Didier's latest mistress - she first met him at the restaurant where she works in Brussels.  Didier is ready to end the affair when she suddenly reveals to him that she is pregnant with his child.  When her lover refuses to marry her, Leone threatens to pay his wife a personal visit.  In a panic, Didier attacks her and accidentally strangles her to death.  Having disposed of the body, disfigured and concealed in a wicker trunk, Didier settles back into his old routine as if nothing has happened.  A few weeks later, he receives a shock when the police contact him with the news that the suburban house where he killed Leone has been burgled.  It is his protective sister Clémence who notifies the police that the missing possessions include her old wicker trunk.

It isn't long before Leone's corpse is fished out of a lake in a Parisian park.  A piece of paper found on the dead body leads the police to the restaurant where Leone worked, and hence to the identification of the murdered woman.  Among the victim's possessions is an unsent letter addressed to her lover.  It isn't long before a link is established between Leone Fassler and Didier Guéret, but conclusive evidence of the latter's guilt continues to elude Police Inspector Lotte.  Didier resists the police's attempts to force a confession from him, knowing that if his guilt is established the shock of this will surely kill his wife.  In the end, the police have no choice but to let their prime suspect go.  Didier returns home to find that Alberte has died in his absence.  With nothing left to fear, he rings up Lotte and confesses to the murder.