The Soft Skin (François Truffaut, 1964)

Françoise Dorléac and Jean Desailly in The Soft Skin

Pierre Lachenay: Jean Desailly
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.

The Last Métro (François Truffaut, 1980)

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Poiret, Andréa Ferréol, Paulette Dubost, Jean-Louis Richard, Maurice Risch, Sabine Haudepin, Heinz Bennent. Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Claude Grumberg. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Production design: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. Film editing: Martine Barraqué. Music: Georges Delerue.

Watching The Last Métro only a day after The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls, 1969) was instructive, if a little bit unfair to François Truffaut's romantic backstage drama. The two films deal with the same milieu, France during World War II, but with such differing approaches that the stark devotion to ferreting out the truth in Ophüls's film makes Truffaut's dramatization of the plight of a Jewish theater owner and his company feel more glossy and sentimental than it perhaps really is. Truffaut, who was born in 1932, was only a boy during the war, so he can't be expected to have the kind of first-hand awareness of events that the adults pictured in his film possess. Consequently, his own preoccupation, the world of actors and directors, takes precedence in the film over the suffering people endured under the Nazis. He has admitted in interviews that The Last Métro is a kind of companion film to Day for Night (1973), his behind-the-camera account of making a movie. What he does recall is the theater -- in his case the movie theater rather than the legitimate stage -- was a kind of refuge from hardship, the hunger and cold brought about by wartime rationing. People gathered in theaters for communal warmth. The story is principally about an actress, Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), who is trying to keep the theater that was run before the war by her husband, Lucas (Heinz Bennent), open. Lucas, who is Jewish, is rumored to have fled to America, but in fact he is hiding in the cellar of the theater while Marion, with the help of the rest of the regular company, stages a play. The director, Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), is working from the notes Lucas made on the play before his disappearance. Cottins has his own dangerous secret: He's gay. A new leading man, Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), joins the company, and inevitably a tension develops between him and Marion. Meanwhile, Lucas has figured out ways to listen in on rehearsals and make suggestions to Marion that she passes along to Cottins, who is unaware of Lucas's hiding place. Marion also has the difficulty of dealing with the authorities, who could close the theater at any moment, especially when the influential critic Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), a collaborator with the Nazis, takes an interest in her and the play. What takes place on stage, namely the sexual tension between the characters played by Marion and Bernard, often mirrors what's happening backstage. The Last Métro is a well-crafted movie -- Truffaut wrote the screenplay with Suzanne Schiffman -- that was France's entry for the best foreign-film Oscar and won a raft of the French César Awards, including one for cinematographer Nestor Almendros.

Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)

Day for Night has a certain notoriety as the film that caused a rift between the New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. As the story goes, Godard walked out of a screening of Day for Night and charged that Truffaut had a fraudulent, sentimental view of the traditional movie-making that had been their targets in their first features, The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) and Breathless (Godard, 1960). Godard, the purist, had maintained his radical political leftism from the beginning; Truffaut, who was an unabashed fan of movies no matter what their politics, had not maintained, in Godard's view, a strict enough awareness of his social responsibility as a filmmaker as his career advanced. Godard is, on his own terms, accurate about this aspect of Truffaut's work, so it all boils down to which filmmaker you prefer. As I happen to love them both, I won't take sides. Godard shows me things in movies that I haven't seen anywhere else, while Truffaut's humanity wins me over almost every time. Day for Night was, as it happens, a fair target for Godard's kind of criticism: It was warmly embraced by the establishment that Godard scorned, namely the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave it the best foreign language film Oscar for 1973 and, because of eligibility rules, led a year later to nominations for Truffaut as best director and (with Jean-Louis Richard and Suzanne Schiffman) for best original screenplay, as well as a best supporting actress nomination for Valentina Cortese. (She lost to Ingrid Bergman in Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express, leading to a famous moment in which Bergman blurted out in her acceptance speech that she thought Cortese would win -- and then later expressed her embarrassment that she had slighted the other three nominees in the category.) Day for Night is still one of Truffaut's most enjoyable movies, an account of the difficulties encountered by a director (played by Truffaut himself) in completing a studio-produced melodrama called Meet Pamela. He has to contend with an aging alcoholic actress (Cortese) who can't remember her lines so they have to be posted around the set, and who repeatedly opens the wrong door and walks into a closet during one of her big scenes. There is also a fragile leading lady (Jacqueline Bisset) who is returning to work after a nervous breakdown, an unexpectedly pregnant actress (Alexandra Stewart) in a key supporting role, an aging matinee idol star (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud) whose life is complicated by his romantic notions about women. Moreover, one of these performers will die before filming ends, making things even more difficult. That the film also bristles with insights into the filmmaking process only makes it a more durable addition to Truffaut's canon. For once, the English title, which refers to the technique of underexposing or filtering the images so that daytime shots appear to be taking place at night, is more suggestive than the French one (La Nuit Américaine is the French phrase for the same process) in evoking the illusion/reality paradox involved in making movies. One additional plus: Georges Delerue's wonderful score.