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The Woman Next Door

Screening: Monday 14 May, 6:30pm

The Woman Next Door (François Truffaut, France 1981) [La femme d’à côté]

For all the period charm of his historical pieces – from Jules and Jim to The Last Métro – Truffaut increasingly looks more comfortable with contemporary domestic dramas drawn from the bourgeois milieu. In this context, The Woman Next Door recounts its tale of amour fou in a provincial town with absolute narrative confidence.

Depardieu (plus wife and kid) moves in next door to a newly-married woman (Ardant) with whom he had an obsessional affair eight years earlier. But as Truffaut steers his audience towards the tragic dénouement, the effect is a curiously passive experience, as if, like passengers on a bus tour, we are offered a scenic excursion without ever being driven to the precipice from which his protagonists will fall. (Martyn Auty)

Written by Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. Photographed by William Lubtchanksy. With Gérard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Henri Garcin, Michèle Baumgartner.

(DVD, Colour, 131 mins, In French with English subtitles, R13)

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