La peau douce

French drama from writer-director Francois Truffaut. A respected author and lecturer (Jean Desailly) has an affair with a young stewardess (Francoise Dorleac).

I believe this film is deeply personal for Truffaut. He has several films about male protagonists who cheat on their wives or girlfriends (Bed and Board and The Man Who Loved Women, for example). What I like best about The Soft Skin is precisely that the affair happens because the stewardess is impressed to get involved with a minor celebrity, and he sleeps with her mainly because he can. They don't "fall in love" with each other; it's an adultery story, not a love story. Because the emotional involvement of the characters isn't very great, neither is the involvement of most of the audience. I will infer that Truffaut had more than one fling like this, but had no insight into why he did this. The subject is personal, but nothing about the presentation helped to alleviate that paucity of engagement.

Two other points: 1) Truffaut's films tend to be very one-paced. They don't usually quicken, slow down, speed up, etc. They proceed pretty much at the same pace from beginning to end. This is a real limitation. 2) I have come to believe that as much as Truffaut loved Hitchcock's films, as a director he learned absolutely nothing from him. Hitchcock is a master of pacing. The best moments in Truffaut's films usually come from a realist aesthetic that is the opposite of Hitchcock's master manipulation of genre and audience.

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.

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.

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".

Imagine how director François Truffaut felt at the Cannes premiere of this film as more than half the audience walked out. In terms of audience approval, "La peau douce" was Truffaut's big disaster. Why did audiences hate it so much? For the exact reasons that it is a landmark film.

1. The main character is not very likeable; he's almost completely expressionless even though this is a love story. 2. Certain events happen in a way that isn't exactly realistic: an elevator takes nearly 2 minutes to travel up 5 floors but only 15 seconds on the way down. 3. Certain events happen without any dialogue or explanation, just a succession of close ups showing objects and activity. But these 3 points are very deliberate, and they are what make "La peau douce" such a tremendous work of art.

1. Why is the main character not likeable? As Truffaut said, this film is "an autopsy of adultery". The story is about a respectable man with a meticulously perfect life who engages in a very imperfect affair. Truffaut wanted to present everything as objectively as possible so that we can analyze all the elements without the prejudice of sentimentality. So he made the lead actor Jean Desailly play the role of "Lachenay" with neutrality; we sense deep emotion, but there are no melodramatic scenes of outward expression as we've come to expect in love stories. If you think about it, isn't that how most people's love lives are? We don't usually get dramatic closeups with soft lighting and complimentary filters. An objective observer woudn't necessarily sympathize with what we're feeling but rather would scrutinize our actions & choices. And as far as that goes. Lachenay makes some pretty bad ones.

2. How realistic is the storytelling? At times, not very. But this style is one of the greatest examples of "hyper realism" which is something Truffaut learned from his mentor and idol Alfred Hitchcock. For example in the elevator scene, time is stretched on the way up, intensifying the first meeting between Lachenay and Nicole (excellently played by Françoise Dorléac, the carefree, outgoing sister of Catherine Deneuve). Only a handful of words are said, but in true Hitchcockian form it's a very suspenseful and portentous scene that deserves its full 2 minutes. The same elevator ride down, with Lachenay alone, is designed to give us contrast and return us to the realistic world as the 5-floor descent is shown in real time, only 15 seconds.

3. Dude where's the dialogue? It's there, but sometimes it's conspicuously absent like in the entire seduction scene which consists of a wordless walk down a hotel hallway, a fumbling for some keys, a lingering stare, hands touching as a door is opened, one hand turning on the light while another hand turns it off, and finally a magnificent dark silhouette of 2 people facing each other. Fade to black. Did we really need any dialogue to understand exactly what was going on in their heads? No, we didn't even need any facial expressions. Again drawing an idea from his hero Hitchcock, even taking the idea into new territory, Truffaut fully embraced the idea of image based storytelling. (In his letter of introduction to Hitch, Truffaut closed by saying that if all movies were suddenly silent again, then Hitchcock would prove himself the greatest storyteller of all time.)

A quick note about the ending (NO SPOILERS) because half a dozen other reviewers seem to have a problem with it: Um you guys realize that the ending was taken from an event that actually happened in real life, right? Look it up (AFTER the film)!

There are so many other gems in this film worth mentioning, but my review would drag on for hours, and that time is better spent with you experiencing this flick firsthand. Audiences of 1964 hated it, but now looking back some 70 years, we realize that "La peau douce" is a masterpiece.