François Truffaut
La Calda Amante

A film little loved by Truffaut himself, who saw in "The Soft Skin" ('63) the failed attempt to depict the miseries of Parisian bourgeoisie, without being able to empathize with the protagonist, and without having created the empathy with the actors seen in his earlier works; a film snubbed by critics, who perhaps expected a continuation of the atmosphere and tones of "Jules and Jim"; a film poorly received by the same audience, so much that it ended up among Truffaut’s forgotten works, a director who already struggled at the box office.

One might stop here, and close even before starting a review of this work: if it weren’t for the fact that when you watch it you are bewildered by the sense of desolate inevitability that accompanies it, by the way Truffaut tells a love story with the tones of a thriller, or - perhaps it is the same - narrates love as a prelude to drama, both familial and personal. One is bewildered by the film, as well as the negative - perhaps unjust - judgment that accompanied it for too many years, until the inevitable revaluation.

It is a revaluation that must be shared, though with some reservations.

Whatever Truffaut's judgment of his film was, it must be said that "The Soft Skin" is in full continuity with the director’s previous films: there is the Paris of streets and buildings - as in "The 400 Blows" - there are the lives of ordinary people suspended between everyday life, comedy, and drama, there are feelings, in all their aspects, there is the attempt to renew one’s life - as in "Shoot the Piano Player" - which fails in the face of the difficulty of reconciling one's expectations with those of others - as in "Jules and Jim" - letting fate take its course under the classical binary of love and death.

These are themes that Truffaut not only matured in his previous works but would continually revisit throughout his career, almost as if it were necessary for him to cyclically reflect on the fragility and, at the same time, the paradoxical strength of certain bonds that resulted in tragedy when events put them in question; as if the boy with tormenting origins, from an unstable family, would return - as a man and author - to reflect on himself and the origins of his own turmoil, but also on his own poetics about fleeing loves - and the fleetingness of love - to use a term as overused as it is suitable for the director.

A film coherent with Truffaut’s journey, and at the same time, a significant shift in the director’s language, who in this transitional work begins to refine his narrative language, his directorial technique, distancing himself from certain calligraphic traits that characterized his early works (the coming-of-age tones of "The 400 Blows"; the necessarily sordid noir of "Shoot the Piano Player"; the bucolic mountain or Belle Époque Paris of "Jules and Jim"), in favor of narrative synthesis and dramaturgical cohesion.

These are qualities that seem to derive directly from some of Hitchcock’s films, so much so that, watching "The Soft Skin" without knowing its director, one might be tempted to believe it to be a film by the latter: consider the long sequence in which the protagonist is taken to the airport to Lisbon, where the drama begins, and under the skies of Paris and the car headlights, one seems to sense, the start of a mystery, almost a chase: not for a thief, as will be discovered, but for a new woman, and a new life.

Regardless of the formal aspects, "The Soft Skin" stands out for being a story of poetic aspirations without poetry, epic attempts at redemption without epic, passions without genuine passion, feelings without sentimentality, and perhaps even without heart: in narrating a bourgeois intellectual who falls in love with an attractive stewardess, making the decision to leave wife and daughter to start anew, Truffaut doesn’t find the aspirations for freedom of "Jules and Jim," nor the melancholic acceptance of the pianist’s fate, but rather the dimension of caprice, hypocrisy, the routine of transgression itself, and attempts at new beginnings, false renewals: that is all that remains of the romantic tension or feverish decadence once poetry gives way to reality and shows itself as a parenthesis, a temporary impulse.

In this perspective, the film gives us masterful characters and settings, preventing the separation of people and actions from the places, forming a compact and unified whole: Pierre, the protagonist, not incidentally an intellectual - knowledgeable in theory, more than experience; of words, more than actions; of dreams and ambitions, more than deeds - moves from the bourgeois interior of his apartment, orderly and rich as it is cold, to an exotic and alluring Lisbon, crossed by "trams called desire," like someone passing from immobility to life; the lover Nicole, as superficial as she is fascinating (to the protagonist fascinating because superficial) pure beauty, is a character who is constantly on the move for work, belonging neither to Paris nor elsewhere, and without wanting, when it comes down to it, a home and stability, a new beginning; Franca, the wife, Latin and fiery, but burned by the cold fire of one who wants to preserve home and husband as appearance and belonging to the capital’s bourgeoisie, is one with the prison house from which no one must leave to avoid losing their fragile identity.

Among the three main characters of the drama, and in their relationship with places and things, lies one of the possible keys to interpreting the film: he, the husband, contradictory between calm and escape, wanting to reproduce after attempts to flee with the lover, a new stability in a new elegant apartment; she, the wife, entrenched in the bourgeois interiors of her home, until the certainty of having lost everything leads her to go out, to meet the husband in the bistro where the story ends; the other, the lover, caught aboard a plane, of a car, as something indeterminate, unfathomable, never still, up to the point of having no certain identity, definable qualities: not even the fact of being "soft" (or having "soft skin," as the original title would suggest), as the film’s title suggests, so cold is Françoise Dorléac.

Seen this way, the film seems to stand out more for the suggestions it inspires, variable depending on points of view and individual sensitivity, rather than for intrinsic characteristics; it perhaps isn’t memorable cinema - the actors themselves portray cold figures, almost soulless, possibly for this reason not too loved by the director himself - nor is it cinema of the great poetic bursts of early Truffaut; one would then think it's almost a work of craftsmanship, which, in hindsight, one ends up giving a greater value than its actual worth, perhaps influenced by the director’s fame, by the reputation he would build after the great debuts, in the more mature films of subsequent decades.

Yet, with all its limits, it is a film that enchants, among the most captivating by Truffaut: perhaps because the tension between staying and fleeing, knowing and forgetting, living and letting oneself be lived - the film’s main thread - is the tension that animates, and sometimes disheartens, our daily lives and possible dreams. After "Jules and Jim" there remain an empty living room and a vacant apartment: Jean Desailly and Françoise Dorléac seem like faces carved in marble, like the funeral masks of a love born dead.

All too raw, the whole, even for Truffaut, who, over the cold chronicles of announced deaths, would have preferred, in the future, the more languid tones of melodrama, the melancholy of lost loves to the dissection of failed relationships.