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The Soft Skin
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The film will be indecent, completely shameless and
rather sad, but very simple.
– François Truffaut, letter to Helen Scott, July 1963
It has fallen to certain movies to reveal to us the
heartbreaking tenderness of an
At the same time, The
Soft Skin marked a definite rupture in Truffaut’s career, and his evolution
as an artist. As Jean-André Fieschi noted at the time (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 157, July 1964), it is a work that refuses
the overflowing charm of his earlier
successes (especially Jules and Jim,
1962) – there is no longer a widescreen dazzle to Raoul Coutard’s
cinematography here, rather a less sparkling, if no less superbly worked,
monochromatic scale – plunging, instead, into the icier waters of a
“self-critical redefinition”. Fieschi even detects a return to the “salutary viciousness”
of Truffaut’s 1950s writing for Arts (recently assembled by Bernard Bastide in the eye-opening volume Chroniques d’Arts-Spectacles 1954-1958);
for him, The Soft Skin sits with a
group of contemporaneous, more evidently “modern” films that explore, in
various ways, the virtues of negativity:
Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), Alain Resnais’ Muriel (1963)
and Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960).
The director himself insisted on this critical aspect:
although clearly modelled on some aspects of his own life and behaviour (as
later biographies have underlined), The
Soft Skin takes a strict distance from the male “hero”. (Fieschi notes
that, where Truffaut’s often harsh writing addressed itself directly to
filmmakers rather than general readers, now as a filmmaker his critique flows
to the central fictional characters.) The device of ellipsis plays a major role:
the main character’s public speeches are either “diverted” from (by cutting to
other, simultaneous action) or skipped altogether. It is also a film of immense restraint, especially on the level of
the direction of actors, which at moments approaches a “Bressonian” blankness
and functionality – mixed, as always, with the Hitchcockian syntax of the POV
shot.
The story poses the character of Pierre (Jean
Desailly) – an extremely weak, cowardly and evasive celebrity literary scholar
(!) in his mid-age – between a passionate, fiery wife, Franca (Nelly Benedetti),
and a younger mistress, Nicole (Françoise Dorléac), who he meets in her work as
an airline hostess (although – recurring and possibly psychoanalytic
Truffauldian obsession – she tells him they almost met once before; there are no pure “first times” in his cinema of encounter).
Much of the slow build-up of this triangular situation
reveals Truffaut, for the first (but far from last) time in his career, in a
Jacques Becker mode – a model-director he revered. The texture of the low-key
incidents is woven from mundane, even banal, routine gestures and rituals;
turning lights on and off, riding elevators, placing keys in doors, dialling
phone numbers, filling a car with petrol and watching the numbers on the pump
roll over.
All such actions are carefully stylised in space and
(especially) telescoped in time – observe the treatment of the many driving
trips, whether out of town, or to and from the airport – but none are symbolic
in a heavy-handed way. Expressive, yes, but the mood and meaning always inhere in the physical action, à la Becker at his best – backed up by
George Delerue’s magnificently lyrical but equally restrained musical score. And
the (in this context) exotic locations of Lisbon or Reims have never been
rendered so minimally – or drably.
As Jean-Louis Comolli would write four years later (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 205, October 1968,
p. 57) on the release of Stolen Kisses (1968), grasping the nettle of this style while misrecognising it (in my
opinion) as a “radical change in Truffaut’s approach and his conception of
cinema”: “The concern for realism is liquidated in favour of a credibility
owing only to the singular force of the film’s own total coherence”.
Eventually, The
Soft Skin spares us none of the pain or confusion inherent in this triangular
situation: Nicole’s embarrassment and awkwardness as she is shuffled around
secretly and kept waiting, alone in dingy hotel rooms or being rudely
propositioned out on the street; Franca’s rising hysteria level as she makes passionate
love to her husband in a last-ditch attempt to hold their marriage together. The
tipping-point comes when Franca discovers (in a clever plot contrivance) the
photos that Pierre has taken of Nicole and himself. At that juncture, Soft Skin unexpectedly but satisfyingly
shifts to a plateau of melodrama (Truffaut ended up suppressing all obvious “foreshadowing”
of the all-important hunting rifle – now it just appears in the family closet);
reviewers of the time evoked, in the light of this surprising finale, the
already then semi-forgotten “boulevard” plays of Paul Bourget (1852-1935) and
especially Henri Bernstein (1876-1953), who Resnais would later revisit (with
extraordinary results) in his extremely faithful adaptation of the 1929 Mélo in 1986.
Much of The Soft
Skin’s plangent poignancy comes from the fact that so little of what really
goes on in the hearts of its protagonists is ever really avowed or discussed openly
by them. Indirection, misdirection (through lying), evasion, clamming up are
always the preferred modes of contact. From the reticent, withdrawn and
secretive figure of the director’s semi alter
ego Antoine Doinel (in instalments from 1959 to 1979), to the
full-blown repression and explosion of passions in The Woman Next Door (1981), this pervasive unspokenness provides a profound key to the subterranean tensions
that draw Truffaut’s œuvre into a tight, overall unity.
We often sense a hide-and-seek, this discreet but
ever-trembling tension in Truffaut’s cinema: he makes films to approach pain, amour fou, death, grief, fear, anxiety, suffering,
depressive melancholia – but also to manage them, contain them. He approaches
the sun with sunglasses on. (Just as Pierre often camouflages himself in hat
and glasses.) But if there is such classical restraint, such tact in Truffaut – observe the polite prelude
to the first sex scene, where Pierre runs his finger along the contours of
Nicole’s face in the dark – there is also the reverse effect: a simple insert
shot, unremarkable in many other films, can register as a significant eruption
of super-charged emotion. Likewise, merely a subtle acceleration of rhythm in
the alternation of camera set-ups (as in the extraordinary scene of Pierre
fondling Nicole’s legs as she sleeps) wields enormous affect.
Let us look at a rich scene from The Soft Skin – one that deserves Fieschi’s label of “algebraic
precision” – in this light. Pierre has rushed to the airport in the hope of
catching Nicole; an overhead plane signals to him that he has missed her, and that
he may as well drive back home. But he enters the terminal, anyhow, to write a
telegram – a passionate declaration of his devotion, and of her overwhelming
role in his life (“I’ve become a new man”), which ends with the words: “I love
you.” The way that Truffaut treats this simple sequence of actions is very
telling.
As Pierre enters the airport, the shots follow The Soft Skin’s standard pattern: three
images record the banal actions of his walking, getting a ticket, approaching a
counter. But when a lap-dissolve ellipse takes us to the telegram that he
handles, and on which he will write, everything quickly becomes more stylised.
Delerue’s music languidly builds in layers of chords – a suspension-effect that
Ennio Morricone also often uses. The first dissolve inaugurates a series in
which, for once, strict narrative economy (despite the evident
time-abridgements) seems secondary to the effect of the moment: the leap from
him writing the name “Nicole” to the view (closer up) of him inscribing “I love
you” has an immense, even unexpected, expressive power. After a shot of Pierre
reading, yet another shot of the telegram allows a scansion of the entire text.
This insistence, the literalness or spelling-out of such detail – similar to
the by-play with mixed-up numbered hotel door keys earlier on – is more than
the plot (in any Hitchcockian-Langian sense) strictly requires. Yet another
shot of the telegram has an odd narrative pretext: Pierre adds a superfluous
dash between the last word of the text (“aime”) and his own name. And it is on
this precise shot – in an image-sound overlap technique prevalent in Truffaut –
that the scene hinges: Nicole’s voice is heard off-screen. The editing moves
faster now: she is walking, talking to a friend; he calls to her, she stops and
notices him.
Then comes the real shock of the entire scene: a
close-up insert – the fifth time now that we have been shown this page – of the
phrase “je vous aime”, which motivates the following close-up of Pierre, but is
itself, in a strictly classical sense, unmotivated: the character is not
looking, from far or near, at the object/prop which is this telegram. A secret
plot action (secret in that it is neither seen nor known by Nicole) instantly
follows in the same shot of Pierre: a quick pan shows his folding and pocketing
of the note. Nicole and Pierre approach each other slowly, in a dance-like movement
– but the music has ended, Raoul Coutard’s camerawork has a deliberate, cinéma-vérité bumpiness to it, and the
everyday register is returning: the soundtrack is filled with the dull murmur
of flight announcements. The final shot of the scene, under a dialogue exchange
of banal pleasantries, shows the terminal point of Pierre’s previous, private
gesture: presumably without looking (because he fumbles a little), he swiftly
takes the telegram from his pocket, scrunches it up, and bins it. A chapter in
this histoire d’amour has been
closed, and the emotional force or intensity underpinning it has been both, in
the same current, unleashed and contained.
It’s curious to see how The Soft Skin has invited, even from its specialist commentators, a
certain condescending scorn. One widely consulted book on the director's career
(Don Allen’s Finally Truffaut) informs
us with certainty that adultery is a "cinematically hackneyed
subject". Fieschi took an oblique view on this thematic subject matter:
“Adultery” – to which he gave a capital A – “is not an idea here, but the scrupulous sum of a particular number of
definite, localised actions: the precise object, for once, of a film’s
mechanics, an essay on the complete representation of a mode of behaviour, from
first reflex to possible conclusion”. Fieschi’s own conclusion is bleak: “What
remains are not archetypal truths, but small truths, i.e., small lies”. But is
Truffaut’s film (and his œuvre in general) so devoid, in the final count, of
sublime amorous passion? And why should we be more resistant to this subject of
adultery than any other in the annals of fiction? Is it because the Eternal
Triangle somehow reduces life to the level of a cheap, trashy soap opera?
Ultimately (and here I depart strongly from Fieschi), we have to take that
soapie dimension – the “old-fashioned melodrama” – of love quite seriously.
Who wrote the Book of Love? That
old doo-wop song expresses both exasperation and admiration that someone,
somewhere, foresaw so perfectly all the inevitable steps, stages, phases and
levels of the typical love relationship. Truffaut had an especially keen
investment in telling the ever-variable stories in that Book of Love.
MORE Truffaut: Day for Night, Two English Girls, Mississippi Mermaid book review:: Totally Truffaut: 23 Films for Understanding the Man and the Filmmaker © Adrian Martin December 1997 / March 2012 / March 2020 |
