Film

La Peau Douce (1964)

Director: François Truffaut

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A superb tragi-comedy of adultery in which a middle-aged intellectual ducking out from under a demanding wife tries to turn a casual affair with an air hostess into the love of his life, but succeeds only in triggering a calamitous crime passionel. Wry, disenchanted, directed with an astonishingly acute eye for the disruptions of modern urban living (the film is punctuated by gears changing in cars, lights being switched on and off), it is rather as though the airily fantastic triangle of Jules and Jim had been subjected to a cold douche of reality. Between the two films, Truffaut had been preparing his book on Hitchcock, and the lesson of the master, evident in the rigour of Truffaut's direction, is even more pleasingly applied in the irony whereby the hero's chosen mistress turns out to be a cool, teasingly uninvolved blonde, while all the passion lurks in the dark wife's libido.

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