La peau douce (1964)

User Rating:

7.6/10   

Director:

François Truffaut

Writers:

François Truffaut (screenplay) &
Jean-Louis Richard (screenplay)

Release Date:

20 April 1964 (France)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Plot:

Pierre Lachenay is a well-known publisher and lecturer, married with Franca and father of Sabine, around 10. He meets an air hostess, Nicole. They start a love affair, which Pierre is hiding, but he cannot stand staying away from her.

Plot Keywords:

Love Affair | Reims | Photo Shop | Motel | 1960s

Awards:

1 win & 1 nomination

Cast

Jean Desailly	...	Pierre Lachenay
Françoise Dorléac	...	Nicole (as Françoise Dorleac)
Nelly Benedetti	...	Franca Lachenay
Daniel Ceccaldi	...	Clément
Laurence Badie	...	Ingrid
Philippe Dumat	...	Directeur cinéma Reims
Paule Emanuele	...	Odile
Maurice Garrel	...	Bontemps
Sabine Haudepin	...	Sabine Lachenay
Dominique Lacarrière	...	La secrétaire Dominique
Jean Lanier	...	Michel
Pierre Risch	...	Chanoine
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
François Truffaut	...	Le pompiste (voice)

Also Known As:

Angústia (Portugal)
The Soft Skin (USA)

Runtime:

113 min | France:119 min (director's cut) | Portugal:110 min (cut version)

Country:

France | Portugal

Language:

French | Portuguese | English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | France:U | Sweden:15 | West Germany:12

Filming Locations:

Lisbon, Portugal

Company:

Les Films du Carrosse

Trivia:

The scenes set in Pierre Lachenay's apartment were filmed in Truffaut's own home.

Goofs:

Continuity: Pierre and Nicole are in a hotel elevator approaching the 8th floor, Pierre is on the right side. The following shot from outside the elevator shows Pierre on the opposite side.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in La nuit américaine (1973)

Soundtrack:

Symphonie de Jouets (Toy Symphony)

Stolen moments

"La Peau douce" is a profoundly melancholic film from François Truffaut. It depicts in restrained, plaintive tones an adulterous relationship between Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly), a middle-aged literary publisher of some renown, and Nicole (Françoise Dorléac), a much younger air stewardess. The narrative follows the relationship from its tentative beginnings in Lisbon, where Lachenay is giving a lecture, through a frustrating trip to Reims that resolves itself in an idyllic interlude at a countryside motel, to a return to Paris, reality, and a shattering conclusion. The film is also notable for the welter of incidental detail of the way modern life was lived back in the early sixties. Truffaut evidently had a fascination with the then relatively new phenomenon of international air travel, not to mention elevators, motor cars and electric lighting. Another point of interest is that the Lachenay's unusually designed apartment was in fact Truffaut's own, and its lived-in feel lends the scenes in which it's featured a pleasing sense of matter-of-fact realism that carries over to the rest of the movie.

Although the influence of Hitchcock is palpable in the measured takes and general sense of foreboding that pervades the entire movie, "La Peau douce" is not so much suspenseful as tense. Among the film's principle achievements is its incomparably sensitive rendering of the poignant mix of elation, anxiety and disconnection (from the world and, often, each other) that the lovers experience during their stolen moments together, as well as the anguish felt by the adulterous husband as his deceit begins to eat into his fifteen-year marriage to Franca (Nelly Benedetti). Lachenay, a buttoned-up bourgeois character straight out of Simenon, is quite brilliantly portrayed by Desailly. Outwardly a respectable, successful man, he is privately timid and fastidious. Utterly besotted with Nicole, he has a boyish fascination with her that makes him by no means unsympathetic, but at the same time he's self-centred and irritable, especially once he has got what he wants. In perfect counterpoint, Dorléac offers an unaffected, instinctive turn that embodies the bohemianism of the sixties. She's in the moment, where Desailly's Lachenay is struggling to be present even to himself. Benedetti's Franca, the third point of the triangle, tangibly embodies the psychic wounds of an unfulfilled marriage and, later, the seething rage of a scorned wife. But the character, though pivotal, is somewhat less fully developed than the other two, a slight weakness in the film arising possibly because Truffaut's heart, along with that of his co-writer Jean-Louis Richard, is manifestly with the lovers. Nevertheless you can virtually smell the stale odour of a marriage that seems irremediably reduced to small talk and petty quarrels. Truffaut is clearly not indifferent to the pain caused by marital breakdown, and he heightens the sense of tragedy by the simple inclusion of several naturalistic family scenes featuring the Lachenay's young daughter Sabine.

Unpopular on its release, and still an overlooked film in Truffaut's oeuvre, it feels in the best sense like the work of a much older man (he was a mere 32 when it premiered at Cannes). It achieves a simplicity and a depth without seeming to have had to strive for it. There's a quietly haunting score by Georges Delerue, and all the other technical contributions, not least Raoul Coutard's subdued black and white photography, are from the top drawer.