The Soft Skin (Francois Truffaut, 1964)

The title of Francois Truffaut’s The Soft Skin seems to promise a sensuousness that barely exists in the film itself, thus perfectly summing up its examination of the gulf between romantic fantasy and drab, logistical reality. It’s among his gravest and most sober films, to an extent that has sometimes left viewers puzzled or underwhelmed, but might as aptly be judged as one of his most effective fusions of form and content. It’s apt that the protagonist Lachenay, a high-profile public intellectual of a kind that can hardly be conceived of now, falls for a flight attendant, as the movie dates from the period when the romance of air travel was at its highest: Truffaut makes the initial mutual intrigue easy enough to grasp, but after that he hardly attempts to probe the heart of the relationship, focusing instead on complications and obstacles, in particular a bleakly comic ulterior-motivated trip to Reims where everything intervenes to keep the two apart. The affair’s ultimate end, similarly, comes like the brisk cut of a scalpel, and although the film ends on a classic “crime of passion,” it’s hard to tell whether it’s really that, or whether we’re watching the almost unconscious acting out of a socially-determined cliché, as much as the arc of the affair itself. The film pointedly includes moments when we witness Lachenay’s mind momentarily turning at the possibilities of other barely glimpsed women, and others that record how a woman can barely walk alone in the street without being harassed: but then equally as significant is the way that his hosts in Reims load up his schedule with a dinner at which they pepper him with mostly trivial questions, to be followed by a reception (which he skips out on). That is, whether in one’s cultural or intimate pursuits, the movie leaves a deep sense of weary, dissatisfied compulsion taking precedence over truth and self-awareness.