La chambre verte

Green Room, The (1978)

** (out of 4)

Truffaut plays a journalist still grieving the death of his wife nearly ten years after her passing. Her passing helped his obsession of death, which ends up making him a friend in an equally strange woman (Nathalie Baye) who also has her own interesting thoughts on the subject. As his obsession grows deeper, the man decides to buy a chapel and turn it into a sanctuary for his wife and other dead friends. This is an extremely bizarre film from Truffaut and while I'm still new to his work, this here is certainly the least entertaining of his films that I've seen. I think the entire film is just one real big mess that never really makes sense of what it's trying to do. I couldn't help but feel a tad bit lost as the movie never really seems clear as to what it's trying to say about death as both characters are pulling in opposite directions. I found their relationship to be extremely forced and completely make belief as not for a single second did I feel either one could care for the other. Another minor issue was the performance by Baye, which I thought was rather weak. The problem with this is that Truffaut was pretty good and the two just don't work very well together and in the end it hurts the film because not only does their relationship feel weak but it doesn't help that the actor is so many better than the partner. I'd be lying if I said I hated this movie because I really didn't. There just wasn't anything here that kept me overly entertained and in the end I was just too bored by the characters and screenplay.

Most reviews here are positive, and luckily so: this is a tremendous film. Thought provoking, even disturbing a bit. And wonderfully photographed by Maestro Nestor Almendros. The film simply looks stupendous !

What seems odd is that not one review here, against or for this film, mentions the mute child.

Is there significance to his part, other than to show that Julien Davenne cannot communicate with the world except in obituaries and in sign language ? It is hard to tell, but the role played by the blonde kid is quite poetic, and maybe for that reason alone an asset for this 'La Chambre Verte', which is as wonderful as it is unsettling.

Francois Truffaut certainly spread his net widely when sourcing filmic material and has here drawn inspiration from two short stories and a novella by Henry James. There is something of the biographical in most of Truffaut's oeuvre but this is indisputably his most intensely personal and heartfelt.

The death of his contemporaries, notably his mentor André Bazin and film archivist Henri Langlois, made him all too aware of his own mortality and he has cast himself as Julien Davanne, a writer of obituaries, whose obsession is to create a chapel of remembrance for his late, beloved wife and others who have touched his life. This brings him into contact with Cecilia who is mourning a man who was once a friend of Julien's but who had since betrayed him........

Despite its depressingly morbid subject matter this is a film that once seen, is not easily forgotten and the suitably gloomy atmosphere is courtesy of Néstor Almendros' muted cinematography. Truffaut had also felt the loss of one of France's greatest film composers, Maurice Jaubert, who perished in the early days of WWII and his use of Jaubert's music is inspired, especially in the chapel scenes. The eagle eyed will no doubt spot the photograph of Oskar Werner in the guise of a German soldier. He and Truffaut had worked together twice and ironically, were both fated to die the same year.

Julien's scenes with the mute boy Georges are reminiscent of those between Dr. Itard and Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron in 'L'Enfant Sauvage' and reveal that Julien is capable of showing compassion for the living as well as for the dead.

The question that arises in both films is whether Truffaut made the right decision in casting himself as the leading character. Personally I feel that although Truffaut got away with it in the earlier film he does not fare as well in this. He is suitably forbidding and distant but there is such a thing as dramatic license and the role ideally required an actor of greater range. Truffaut himself was later to acknowledge this. He certainly got it right however when casting Nathalie Baye whose performance as Cecilia is simply stupendous and touches the heart.

Although critically well received the film was commercially catastrophic which not only affected the director's health but caused him to lose financial backing from the French arm of United Artists.

Based upon the principle that 'everyone has their dead' Truffaut felt that the film would strike a chord with audiences but he had sorely underestimated the capacity of most humans to overcome their grief and failed to recognise that for the majority, 'Life belongs to the living'.

Eleven years after the end of World War I, in a small village in the East of France, the journalist Julien Davenne (François Truffaut) still grieves the death of his beloved wife Julie ten years ago. He worships Julie in a green room in his house decorated with her pictures and belongings. When he meets auctioneer's assistant Cecilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye) in an auction house, they see that they have in common the obsession for death and become close to each other. When a fire destroys his green room, Julien convinces the bishop to restore the local chapel and prepare it as a sanctuary for Julie and his dead friends to preserve their memories, while Cecilia falls in love for him, but Julien is dead inside.

"La Chambre Verte" is the darkest of the Truffault's movies that I have seen. The melancholic romance has a beautiful cinematography; has great performances with Truffault in the role of Julien Davenne, a man that writes obituaries in the dying newspaper Le Globe and most of his friends have already died, and the gorgeous Nathalie Baye as an old acquaintance that falls in love for him. But the story is extremely unpleasant and somber and I did not like it. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Quarto Verde" ("The Green Room")

Francois Truffaut's wife died years ago, and he has since kept a shrine to her, a green room where he keeps her belongings, where he speaks to her. When he encounters Nathalie Baye, who seems to have a similar feeling about the dead, he can choose to be a man among the living, or build a chapel to the dead, to be completed with his own death.

Truffaut's adaptation of Henry James' "The Altar of the Dead" is a sere, underplayed movie about people who have given up on life in the aftermath of the First World War, and seek am excuse in the idealization of the dead. It's madness, but an attractively passive form of madness. Unfortunately, Truffaut, as great a director as he was, was not the actor to bring off this role.

I, too, have reached a stage in life when I know more dead people than living ones. I don't talk to them; they never shut up long enough to let me get in a word edgewise. But even these ghosts know that life is for the living.