La Peau douce (1964) - film review

Pierre Lachenay is a world-renowned literary expert and publisher.  He is married to Franca and lives in Paris with his young daughter Sabine.  On the flight to Lisbon, where he is to give a lecture on Balzac, he meets air hostess Nicole and is instantly drawn to her.  Pierre and Nicole later meet up in Lisbon and begin a passionate love affair, which they continue in secrecy on their return to Paris.  When Pierre is invited to give a lecture in Reims, he asks Nicole to accompany him.  She accepts but Pierre’s professional engagements keep him from his mistress.  To make up, Pierre takes Nicole to a country hotel, where they pass an idyllic few days.  Unbeknown to Pierre, Franca has already uncovered her husband’s infidelity and, consumed with jealousy, she is determined that he should pay dearly for his deception...

After the phenomenal success of Jules et Jim (1962), François Truffaut’s filmmaking career suffered a prolonged period of abeyance as the director struggled to get his dream project - a French film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 - off the ground.  It was whilst trying to find a backer for this film that he undertook his series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, which he subsequently published to great acclaim.   To ensure that his film production company remained solvent as he waited for Fahrenheit 451 to see the light of day, Truffaut decided to knock out a low budget film.  That film was La Peau douce, his fourth and probably most underrated feature.

La Peau douce could hardly have made a more striking contrast with Truffaut’s previous film, although both revolve around the same idea, the tragic love triangle.  Lacking the vitality, bravado and manic emotional swings of Jules et Jim, La Peau douce is a far more introspective, gloomier affair that is steeped in melancholia and bitter irony.  Although some parts of the scenario were based on real-life events reported in the newspapers (including the dramatic denouement), much is taken from Truffaut’s own life, with the result that this is one of the director’s most personal films.  Not long before making La Peau douce, Truffaut had pursued short-term amorous liaisons with Liliane David and Marie-France Pisier, which resulted in the painful breakdown of his marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern.  The male protagonist Pierre Lachenay (superbly portrayed by Jean Desailly) is a timid intellectual who is susceptible to attractive women - clearly Truffaut in all but name.  Truffaut even used his own Parisian apartment as the set for the Lachenay household (primarily to save money).  Whilst most of Truffaut’s films have a strong auto-biographical element, few are so closely wedded to the director’s own real-life experiences as this one.   Françoise Dorléac not only played the mistress of Truffaut’s on-screen alter ego, she would also enchant him in real life, as well she might with her intoxicating charisma, charm and beauty.  This, together with Truffaut’s near-psychotic antipathy for Desailly (who in turn grew to loathe the director and blamed him for wrecking his career) resulted in this being an extremely fraught production.  Dorléac’s death in a car accident a few years after making this film came as a devastating blow to the sensitive filmmaker who had hoped to make her a great film actress.  There was little consolation to be had from the fact that he had given Dorléac her one great screen role.

It is hardly surprising that, having been immersed in the world of Hitchcock for many months prior to making this film, Truffaut should end up employing various Hitchcockian motifs.  Indeed, there are several sequences where La Peau douce feels far more like a suspense thriller than a romantic drama.  The race to the airport at the start of the film is an obvious homage to Psycho (1960), a frantic car journey that will lead inevitably to disaster, whilst the scenes at the Lisbon Hotel, where Lachenay begins his illicit romance, clearly owe something to Vertigo (1958), as the protagonist is haunted by his conception of the perfect woman.  Tacitly avoiding the conventions of the traditional film melodrama, La Peau douce is a daring attempt to present, with an almost visceral integrity, the personal torment experienced by each player in a romantic love triangle.  From the perspective of each of the three protagonists, we are shown how an inconsequential love affair can mushroom into a nerve-wracking, poisonous ordeal, as that other eternal triangle - desire, guilt and jealousy - do their worst and wreak havoc on three previously sane, well-ordered lives.    

La Peau douce is arguably the boldest and most experimental of Truffaut’s films.  It broaches the then controversial subject of adultery with a surprising candour, sparing the audience few of the emotional crises that marital infidelity can cause in real life.  Truffaut himself described the film as the autopsy of a couple, a hopeless situation that has no solution, no way out.  The film’s relentlessly morbid tone proved to be its downfall, however.  After a disastrous premiere at Cannes, La Peau douce was censured by the critics and ended up a box office disaster.  His confidence badly shaken by this failure, the thin-skinned Truffaut was keen to distance himself from the film, although some reviewers (notably his former friends on the Cahiers du cinéma) saw that it had considerable merit and the film was a surprising hit in Scandinavia.  Today, La Peau douce is regarded far more favourably and occupies an essential place in Truffaut’s oeuvre, completing the Nouvelle Vague phase of his career and anticipating the darker, more intimate romantic dramas that would come to dominate his later years.

© James Travers 2011

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