La Chambre verte (1978) - film review

In late 1920s France, Julien Davenne devotes his life to the memory of the dead.  He writes impassioned obituaries for an obscure newspaper and has converted his house’s Green Room into a mausoleum to his wife, who died ten years earlier shortly after their marriage.  When the room is destroyed in a fire, Davenne’s obsession drives him to renovate an abandoned chapel in the cemetery where his wife is buried.  With a sympathetic friend, Cecilia, he intends to build a memorial to his wife and all his dead friends.

Too often overlooked and unfairly wrtten off on account of its seemingly morbid preoccupation with death, La Chambre verte is among François Truffaut’s most hauntingly lyrical films and also one that is among his most personal and revealing.  Since the untimely death of his mentor and spiritual father André Bazin in 1958, Truffaut was troubled by the loss of those who were close to him and those whom he admired, and it was this inner struggle to reconcile himself with the death of others that led him to make his most idiosyncratic film.   In a similar vein to L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), La Chambre verte revolves around a single character - a writer of orbitaries played by Truffaut himself - who falls prey to a destructive idée fixe.  On this occasion, the amour fou that takes hold of the protagonist is not a romantic passion but an all-consuming desire to preserve the memory of the dead, an obsession which causes the protagonist to lose contact with the real world and prevents him from starting a new life with a young woman who shares his respect for the dead, but not in the same obsessive manner.

Truffaut originally conceived the film in 1970, inspired by the Henry James story The Altar of the Dead.  It was almost a decade before he finally got round to making the film, at a time when he was deeply perturbed by the deaths of Henri Langlois (founder of the Cinémathèque Française) and Roberto Rossellini.   Borrowing ideas from other Henry James stories (The Beast in the Jungle and The Friends of the Friends) Truffaut and his faithful screenwriter Jean Gruault developed a darkly introspective portrait of a solitary man who, still disturbed by his experiences as a soldier in World War I, is driven to preserve the memory of his young wife, who died shortly after their wedding.  Truffaut used the film to honour the memory of one of his personal heroes, Maurice Jaubert, a talented composer who scored many notable films of the 1930s (for such luminaries as Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo) but died whilst on active service in WWII.  Truffaut employed Jaubert’s music in many of his films, but never as effectively as on La Chambre verte, which appears to have been created especially to showcase the work of France’s greatest film composer.  Much of the poetry of the film stems from Jaubert’s extraordinarily evocative music, which is so expressive and so perfectly married with Nestor Almendros’ cinematography that the dialogue is almost superfluous.

Although he later had reservations over playing the lead character, Truffaut is perfect for the role of the morbidly introspective Julien Davenne and gives what is possibly his most arresting and poignant performance.  Like Truffaut himself, Davenne is a man who has a greater affinity with the dead than with the living, and his inability to move on and accept the passing of his loved ones is so powerfully rendered that the film can hardly fail to leave a lasting impression.  The vitality and humanity that Nathalie Baye brings to her character make a striking contrast with the numbed self-absorption of Truffaut’s - they appear to be living in different worlds - and yet there is a very tangible sense of connection between the two characters, a reminder perhaps of the inviolable link between the living and the dead.

Whilst La Chambre verte met with almost universal critical acclaim when it was first released in France in 1978, it proved to be a spectacular commercial flop.  The film’s sombre subject matter made it a hard sell and audiences gave Truffaut a resounding thumbs down, something that the director was deeply hurt by and which caused a sudden deterioration in his physical and mental health.   More crucially, the film’s disastrous performance at the box office brought an end to Truffaut’s partnership with Artistes Associés (the French subsidiary of United Artists), which had financed his films for over a decade.  Unable to find a backer for the films he had planned to make after La Chambre verte, Truffaut had no option but to ensure that his next film would be a crowd-pleasing hit.  It was time for Antoine Doinel to come out of mothballs for his final screen adventure...

© James Travers 2012

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