La Peau douce

Truffaut filmed La Peau Douce immediately after the international success of "Jules et Jim". Released at the heyday of the nouvelle vague, critics and audiences panned the film as a futile resort to bourgeois classicism after the unconventional antics of his previous masterwork.

They could not have been more mistaken. Time has treated La Peau Douce better than most of his later efforts. It is definitely a triumph of direction with each scene being carefully planned and meticulously structured, not unlike a Hitchcock movie. In practice, Truffaut transposes Hitchcock's mechanisms of suspense into a seemingly trivial story concerning the illicit love affair of a distinguished editor/author with a younger stewardess and its withering consequences. The characters and the milieu of the story are effortless evoked, but the main joy is derived from the visual inventiveness that Truffaut shows in scene after scene. It's a triumph of a purely cinematic mode of expression, which Truffaut was one of the few who had really mastered it.

François Truffaut's fourth feature and his first true masterpiece is essentially a classic love triangle, filmed like a quiet juggernaut that eventually overwhelms all those involved. On a quick trip to Lisbon for a lecture, literary essayist Jean Desailly's eye catches the lovely Françoise Dorléac, the air hostess on his flight. Soon he's asking her out for a drink and a love affair develops in between her flights, as his married life with seductive but demanding wife Nelly Benedetti slowly unravels. Much to Truffaut's credit, there is no judgment passed on any of the characters: whether Desailly is undergoing a dreaded mid-life crisis and wishes to be young again or is merely indulging an intellectual whim, whether he really wants to prove himself he is still a man capable of passion or just looking for a way out of his stifling marriage, is entirely up to the viewer to decide. But the director doesn't avert his eye from the seedy unpleasantness of the central situation, as the masterfully extended Reims interlude and the shock ending prove. Basically, it's a film about the mess people make when they think they're in love, all the more disturbing because Truffaut bases it all on chance meetings and missed opportunities - had Desailly not arrived late for his plane to Lisbon, had Dorléac not called him back at the hotel, maybe none of this would have happened. Marvelously shot in black and white by Nouvelle Vague lenser Raoul Coutard, this was the very first film where Truffaut showed the world all he was capable of; it's a stunningly modern film on the most classic of all melodramatic stories.

Very poetic, early Truffaut, but already at his best. This story of a middle-aged intellectual man who certainly should not have too much to complain about in his life, but wants to give it a try for whatever reasons (mid-life crisis? vanity? play instinct? the beginnings of some sort of amour fou on his part?), thus bringing about a catastrophe, is brought to the screen in a powerful and masterly way.

It's all been described in large part by other users so far: Raoul Coutard's impressive black-and-white cinematography, the acting by Dorléac, Desailly and Benedetti, it all fitted very well.

What's more to mention, however, is a beautiful soundtrack by Georges Delerue, in my opinion a true masterpiece of film scoring, with a haunting main theme.

This is really a film I shall keep in my heart for a long time. I certainly prefer it to "Jules et Jim".

Truffaut's study of a middle-aged man losing his way in life in the age-old fashion is caught in a mesmerizing series of quick-succession shots and sympathetically-captured quotidian details. An unthinking, self-assured man; his wounded, passionate wife; his sweet, vulnerable lover; an inevitable tragedy. This underrated film has no real surprises, but its sure-footedness is impressive and the simple story ultimately very moving.

On a business trip to Lisbon you're distracted, by a stewardess you find rather attractive, so you take a chance and call, as she's staying down the hall, it's a tangent that will mean, your life's refracted. You're consumed with all the flushes of desire, she's igniting all the flames your wife cant fire, but opportunities to meet, while remaining quite discreet, when back in Paris, leaves you shackled in the mire. A business trip to Reims provides a chance, to take Nicole, and to enjoy some more romance, get some privacy at last, break your circumstantial fast, though best laid plans may leave you looking more askance.

A well-known publisher has an affair that delivers considerably more than he bargained for. Great performances and original for its time.