Francedrama1964 bw 119 min.
Director: Francois Truffaut
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1395L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema

Francois Truffaut was at the absolute height of his reputation when he made La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin, although "The Silken Skin" might be a better translation). After the acute brilliance of his debut feature, The 400 Blows, followed by the impudent parody of Shoot the Piano Player, and then that most poignant of romatice rondos, Jules et Jim, he was at 32 the acceptable face of the French New Wave. Less acerbic and iconoclastic than Godard, more emotionally committed than Chabrol, he loomed as the natural heir to his great predecessor in the French cinema, Jean Renoir. He could, it seemed, essay any genre, tackle any subject, command any budget he wished. Yet The Soft Skin came about by chance. Truffaut wantd to film Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. He could not find a producer in France, and when at last an American, Lewis M. Allen, said he would produce the picture, Truffaut had to fill the interval by making a film in his own language. With each passing year, The Soft Skin looks more assured and less a prisoner of its period than most New Wave Films. A "triangle" drama that deliberately eschews the poetic romance of Jules et Jim, its spare documentary technique appears to anesthetize the love affair between middle-aged intellectual Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) and the young air hostess Nicole (played by Francoise Dorleac, the late sister of Catherine Deneuve, who was killed in a car crash in 1967). But Truffaut's style is in fact an accurate reflection of Pierre's vision: His clandestine liaison with Nicole must needs be ordered in as meticulous a manner as his professional and marital life. From the opening sequence, the brisk, surgical cutting communicates the restless haste and assurance of Pierre's world. In the prime of life, endowed with a glamorous wife, an adoring daughter, and an evident prestige in his field, this most respectable of Frenchmen is en route to yet another speaking engagementÑin Lisbon. When he decides to do something, Pierre Lachenay assumes without hesitation that the world will fall into line. The delight and also the tragedy of the film is that his best-laid plans go awry. Truffaut deftly adapts his visual language to cope with the whims of his leading character. When, for example, Pierre comes back to his bedroom after failing to chat up Nicole in the hotel elevator in Lisbon, he extinguishes the lights one by one; a couple of minutes later, when she has responded to his suggestion of a drink at the bar, he switches on every light he can find in a moment of exultation. Pierre's attention span is that of a grasshopper and, again, Truffaut mirrors this trait with a flurry of close-ups of actions and objects: hands manipuilating gear levers, dialing phone numbers, attending to airplane controls, etc. Raoul Coutard's subjective camera flits from one particular to another, as Pierre's impulsiveness drives him from the distraction of a one-night stand into the toils of a full-blooded extramarital affair. As Don Allen has written in a study of Truffaut, "The role of language here is mainly to conceal emotion rather than to convey it. Inner passions and tensions are portrayed visually: the close-up, over which the opening credits are superimposed, of the clasping and unclasping of two hands -- a woman's and a man's wearing a wedding ring -- is eloquent of the film's general emphasis on impermanence and infidelity." And always in the background, discreet as ever, the music of Georges Delerue sings of regret before the relationship between Pierre and Nicole has even commenced. Truffaut in 1964 was still eager to experiment with form and genre. One of his little trademarks is the still frame. He uses it at the close of The 400 Blows, and in both Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim. Here it occurs just once -- as Pierre Lachenay returns to Paris after his night with Nicole and she, the courteous hostess, says goodbye to him at the door of the aircraft. But in a much wider sense, La Peau Douce represents an experiment. The film combines comedy and melodrama in equal and unexpected measure. The long sequence in Rheims, where Pierre and Nicole hope to have a two-day escapade, is worthy of Woody Allen as events conspire against the lovers, and features an hilarious, tongue-in-cheek cameo from Daniel Ceccaldi as Pierre's host. The final scenes, by contrast, embody the stuff of melodrama, and make us realize that in the English language there is no equivalent for crime passionel, any more than there is for amour fou. Truffaut's declared intention was to render a character more at ease with the past and its former glories than with the present. Lachenay, the expert on Balzac and Gide, was inspired (in the professional sense only) by Henri Villemin, a well-known TV personality in Paris and author of books on such French literary giants as Benjamin Constant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Jean Desailly, often the complacent bourgeois figure in that domestic French cinema little seen abroad (by such 1950s directors as Delannoy, Autant-Lara, Daquin), fulfills his finest screen role in La Peau Douce. Prim, fastidious, conservative, he seeks to tuck his affair with Nicole into the neatly-defined routine of his working life. But Truffaut dilutes Pierre's tragedy by unmasking the distasteful side of his personality. After only a few meetings he treats Nicole with the same irritable condescention he metes out to his wife and secretary, and when he refuses to countenance her as he leaves the cinema in Reims with his host, even the most macho of viewers will side with Nicole. Both Francoise Dorleac, as Nicole, and Nelly Benedetti, as Pierre's smoldering wife, seize their opportunites throughout the film. Each reveals an insecurity and a need for passion that, eventually, dictate the climax of what reamins one of Truffaut's most deeply-felt and exhilarating achievements. -- Peter Cowie

CREDITS


Directed: Francois Truffaut
Written: Francois Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Editor: Claudine Bouche
Music: Georges Delerue
Costumes: Renee Rouzot

TRANSFER

This edition presents The Soft Skin in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1.
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