The Soft Skin
This 1964 movie is not the most lovable of Francois Truffaut’s films. It was made when the young master was in the thrall of Alfred Hitchcock, and Hitchcock was a lot colder an artistic personality than Truffaut. Still, it’s a good film, worth seeing by more than Truffaut completists, and this Criterion release is the best opportunity for audiences to see it in years.
It’s a story of adultery, made at a time when Truffaut’s own marriage was hitting the skids, thanks to his own inability to stay faithful. (Truffaut had affairs with almost all of his leading ladies and also frequented prostitutes during his marriage, not out of sexual frustration, but because he liked prostitutes.) The film stars Jean Desailly as a popular French intellectual in his early 40s, married with children, who has an affair with an airline hostess, played by Francoise Dorleac.
Desailly is perfectly cast, but it’s inevitable that 51 years later all eyes will be on the luminous Dorleac, the older sister of Catherine Deneuve. Dorleac died three years later, in a horrible car crash while racing to catch a plane in Nice. When you think of all that Deneuve has accomplished in the years since, and what she has become in French cinema and cultural life, it’s daunting to contemplate the rich decades that Dorleac might have had.
Anyway, the film is notable for its clinical treatment of the affair. Most movies about adultery enlist the viewer as a virtual participant, but here we remain on the outside, watching the two experiences a series of inconveniences, frustrations and embarrassments. It’s a situation in which we see — so why can’t they? — that no one can possibly be happy and getting busted is simply a matter of time.
The digital conversion is of the highest order — this is probably the best way to see this film since 1964. The extras include an essay by Molly Haskell, a documentary about Hitchcock and Truffaut, a video essay by Kent Jones, and a 1965 interview with Truffaut — the usual Criterion riches, and more. — Mick LaSalle