“The Soft Skin” transposes the liberating adolescence of the Nouvelle Vague into an aimless adult fumbling for meaning. 

François Truffaut’s follow-up to his movement-defining “400 Blows” and “Jules and Jim,” “Skin” has a softer touch; its hands aged by groping for truant love, rather than rebelling against a world that refuses to show affection. 

If the protagonists of “Jules” and “Blows” had no place to store their excess of desire, the central couple of “Skin” puts their wanting in the wrong places. The film depicts a romance between a Balzac scholar and a flight attendant. It’s a pairing made less of finding something in another, and more from the convenience of missing the same parts of the other’s soul. 

There…

“what got into you? weren’t you happy here?”

it all started with Pierre (Jean Desailly) getting off the plane after his arrival to Lisboa, his eyes met with hers — Nicole (Françoise Dorléac), the beautiful statuesque flight attendant for the airline, Panair do Brasil, and suddenly the film freezes just a moment in time — and just for the two of them, their images superimposed onto the screen as if they were made for each other. enamoured by her from first sight, Pierre had sought out to get to know her and Nicole, charmed by his nature, agrees to his advances. soon, the pair becomes intimately entangled with one another: those tender touches, gazes, and under a flickering of light,…

Successful academic Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) begins an affair with beautiful air hostess Nicole (Françoise Dorléac), causing his ordered life to slowly come apart, in François Truffaut‘s romantic drama co-starring Nelly Benedetti, Daniel Ceccaldi and Laurence Badie.

Truffaut gives the film an incredibly evocative atmosphere, making the most of the black-and-white photography to present this noirish tale of secrets and betrayal. It’s a very internal style, one that frequently aligns us from Pierre’s perspective, especially during his initial loneliness and infatuation with Nicole, this technique both giving an insight into his psychology while slowly questioning his choices. This allows the audience to understand but never quite trust the lead character, as his behaviour slowly isolates the people around him.

Desailly…

In Molly Haskell's essay on The Soft Skin, written for the Criterion release of the film, she refers to Franca (Nelly Benedetti), the cheated-on wife of Jean Desailly's spineless academic, as "a smoldering brunette of Latin temperament." In other articles and reviews, the character is referred to variously as "dark, mercurial," "a womanly woman, a passionate woman," "volatile," "sultry [and] impulsive," "fiery", and "demanding, possessive ... dark and passionate." These descriptions, I think, get at what frustrates me about the film: in a movie widely praised for its well-rounded, even-handed portrayal of its central characters (Truffaut is described as "fond and forgiving of his characters' foibles", for example), one of them — arguably the most important one — is left…

The beginning of this film starts with a French business man saying goodbye to his wife before his friend drives him to the airport. Surely this is nothing more than a quotidian journey through typical Parisien traffic. However, as the deadline fast approaches before his flight is scheduled to take off, the scene turns into a muted car chase sequence from a thriller movie, albeit one without an actual chase.

And in a sense, that sums up Traffaut's approach to this film. Essentially, it is that story, as old as the hills, of a married middle aged man having a clandestine affair with a beautiful young woman. Yet, Traffaut uses the music, editing and dramatic tension to lend the subterfuge…

"If we see Hitchcock in Truffaut, it is because of the camera’s gaze: his direct way of telling a story (a close-up of a hand turning on a light, and another immediately turning it off), swerving his camera through spaces with intensity. Another director may have been more passive. The camera thus unfurls this narrative much more than any dialogue could begin to register. When Pierre writes a declaration of love to Nicole and then spots her, Truffaut cuts from her face to an insert of the note, then out to Paul’s face, all before panning down to him crumpling up the note. With words, it would take minutes to describe what is registered by the camera in a matter…