 | François Truffaut's The Woman Next Door continues his fascination with obsessive love. It is a somber, subtly disturbing film about the beauty and destructive toll of passion. Truffaut also juxtaposes extensive incongruities throughout the film in order to illustrate the duality of passion as he discovers something exalting and profoundly disturbing within the story of a rather unpleasant suburban love affair. |
| François Truffaut's The Woman Next Door continues his fascination with obsessive love. It is a somber, subtly disturbing film about the beauty and destructive toll of passion. Truffaut also juxtaposes extensive incongruities throughout the film in order to illustrate the duality of passion as he discovers something exalting and profoundly disturbing within the story of a rather unpleasant suburban love affair. The film is about people who can't live apart but they certainly can't live together, positively a tempestuous relationship. This situation creates an odd, almost inappropriate comic touch, yet this humour is so laced with hints of doom. Certainly in Truffaut’s hands nothing is quite what it appears. The film is never ordinary or predictable in any of its aspects. The real subjects of the film are guilt, passion and terrible consequences of a sin that starts out small, rather like a Hitchcock thriller. In fact Truffaut does a brilliant job of giving us surface images that are almost starkly simple, while beneath the surface there's a labyrinthine tangle of passions. For example Truffaut refuses completely to romanticize Mathilde and Bernard’s situation. Time and time again, his camera captures moments that distance us from the lovers portrayed by the brooding, masculine and handsome Gérard Depardieu and beautiful yet complicated Fanny Ardant, nominated for a Cesar Award for her performance. | It was also his first collaboration with Fanny Ardant, who would become his favored leading lady for the last phase of his career and off-screen love for the last years of his life. Her beauty is mysterious, being slightly coarse as well classically refined. Ardant’s vulnerable performance lingers longest with the viewer, her classic femme fatale features and dark-eyed gaze captured lovingly by Truffaut’s camera. The film’s music by Georges Delerue is fantastic for its somber orchestral score to play into the drama and sense of longing that Bernard and Mathilde have for each other. All of his lovers are doomed by the demons of their passion, and by underlying streaks of violence (in his serious films) and frivolous inability to make a commitment (in his comedies). As Stanley Kaufman crudely says… its either men in love with being in love, women who kill men and children! This is a film about ordinariness and how that unappreciated idyll can be destroyed by chance and true misfortune. This deeply unsettling portrait of obsession and madness is Truffaut on form – It is an elegant, brooding film that resonates with the haunting weight of profound love and tragedy. |
