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| Françoise Dorléac and Jean Desailly in The Soft Skin |
Nicole: Françoise Dorléac
Franca Lachenay: Nelly Benedetti
Clément: Daniel Ceccaldi
Ingrid: Laurence Badie
Theater Manager: Philippe Dumat
Sabine Lachenay: Sabine Haudepin
Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Claudine Bouché
Music: Georges Delerue
Some film titles almost seem to invite critical snark: I'm sure I'm not the first to be tempted to say that The Soft Skin is "only skin deep." But that sums up my reaction to François Truffaut's film: Its characters aren't developed enough. According to Truffaut, the inspiration for the film was seeing a couple kissing in a taxicab and wondering if they were cheating on their respective spouses, which led to meditations on the topic of adultery. Truffaut was working on his book about Alfred Hitchcock at the time, and perhaps Hitchcock's own explorations in voyeurism turned Truffaut into a voyeur as well. The protagonist, Pierre Lachenay, is a celebrated intellectual, a writer and editor whose lectures draw admiring crowds and even bring news photographers out to greet his arrival and ask him to pose with the pretty flight attendant he has encountered on the plane. The flight attendant is Nicole, although the appropriate word for her job would have to be "stewardess," for the film takes place in a time when flight attendants were exclusively young and female, almost airborne geishas, whose job was to please the mostly male business travelers. Their supposed sexual availability was of course an illusion, but one exploited in gag lines like "Coffee, tea, or me?" and in soft- and hard-core porn films. It's also a subtext to the character played by Françoise Dorléac, who captures Lachenay's roving eye on a flight to and from Lisbon, where he gives a talk on Balzac. The development of their affair begins to take on the character of farce, especially when they try to get away from Lachenay's wife for a few days under the cover of an introduction he is giving to a film about André Gide at a theater in Reims. Trying to hide their relationship is harder than they expect: Lachenay keeps encountering obstacles like unexpected dinner engagements and awkward hotel arrangements, and more especially an officious manager of the event who even winds up inviting himself on a ride to Paris with Lachenay, who has tried to cover up the fact that he's at another hotel with Nicole by saying that he has to return to the city that same evening. These scenes are mutedly funny: Their farcical character is tempered by Truffaut's skillful development of tension. Of course, the affair is doomed, but not before Mme. Lachenay learns of it, which leads to a ending marked by melodramatic violence. The whole film is an exhibition of Truffaut's skill; he plays with stretching and foreshortening time, with building suspense, with scenes that echo one another, and with subtle eroticism, all of it heightened by Raoul Coutard's exquisite black-and-white cinematography and Georges Delerue's score. But in Lachenay he hasn't given us a character who draws our sympathy, and his directing Jean Desailly to maintain an inexpressive face allows us to wonder what, exactly, this beautiful young woman sees in this ordinary-looking middle-aged man. It's an often provocative film, but one that depends more on film technique than on engaging characters and effective storytelling, so it left me cold.
