La Femme d'à côté (1981)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

The idea that love can be a terminal illness, a malady of the soul that inflicts nothing but suffering upon those who fall under its spell, is one that reverberates throughout the work of François Truffaut.  The director had explored the potency of this particular form of amour fou in some of his most noteworthy films - Jules et Jim (1962), La Peau douce (1964), Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) and L'Histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) - but it was in his penultimate film, La Femme d'à côté, that the theme was to achieve its most powerful expression.  The darkest and most viscerally intense of all Truffaut's film's, La Femme d'à côté recognises the destructive power of obsessive love and concludes with a motif that serves as an apt résumé of both the director's work and his own amorous experiences - ni avec toi, ni sans toi.  Can't live with you, can't live without you.

The basic premise of the film is one that Truffaut conceived many years previously.  He had sketched out a storyline (entitled Sur les rails) shortly after the traumatic end of his affair with Catherine Deneuve, which had triggered a nervous breakdown and sent him into a psychiatric clinic.  Whatever catharsis Truffaut sought by revisiting the bleakest time in his life was satisfied elsewhere, primarily through his adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché's Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, and so his story about a couple being unable to escape from an erstwhile love affair languished at the back of his mind for a decade.   It was only when he saw Fanny Ardant and Gérard Depardieu together at a reception after the 1981 Césars (at which Truffaut's Le Dernier métro swept the board with 10 awards) that the director knew that his dormant project could now finally see the light of day.  Ardant and Depardieu would be perfect for the roles of the two ill-fated lovers.

Truffaut discovered Fanny Ardant (along with most of the French nation) when she starred in Les Dames de la côte, a prestigious television series broadcast in the winter of 1979.  From the moment he first saw her, Truffaut was mesmerised by Ardant, by her unconventional beauty, her elegance, her exotic charm and her femme fatale mystique.  He wrote to her and arranged a meeting at which he promised to give her a role in his next film after Le Dernier métro.  Fanny Ardant was destined to be the last great love of Truffaut's life.   It was whilst working on La Femme d'à côté that they fell in love and decided to share their lives together, although Ardant was of the view that co-habitation was the surest way to kill romance, so she insisted that they lead separate lives and did not live together.  Right to the end of Truffaut's life, Fanny Ardant was devotedly attached to him and bore his third child, a year before he died from a brain tumour in 1984.  It was Ardant who took the female lead in Truffaut's last film, Vivement dimanche! (1984).

Truffaut had already worked with Gérard Depardieu, on Le Dernier métro (1980), and both director and actor who keen to embark on a second collaboration. The only problem was that Depardieu was already committed to other projects and was available only for a six-week window in the spring of 1981.  This suited Truffaut, who wanted to revert to a more relaxed, improvisational way of making a film after the intense rigours of Le Dernier métro, which had demanded months of careful preparation and had been technically challenging.  The tight filming schedule did not prevent La Femme d'à côté from being one of the happiest of Truffaut's shoots, which is perhaps paradoxical given the grim subject matter of the film.  When the filming began, at a location just outside Grenoble, Truffaut's outline script ran to no more than thirty pages.  Dialogue (written during the shoot, in collaboration with his trusty screenwriters Jean Aurel and Suzanne Schiffman) was supplied to the actors immediately before their scenes were recorded, something that lends the film a noticeable edge of spontaneity and anxiety.

With his frequent collaborator Nestor Almendros otherwise engaged, Truffaut had to call upon the services of another cinematographer, William Lubtchansky.  This was the first and only occasion on which Truffaut worked with Lubtchansky, who had enjoyed a long association with other directors of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard.  Less flamboyant than the other nouvelle vague cinematographers, Lubtchansky had a particular talent for creating a brooding sense of oppression, something which is perfectly suited to La Femme d'à côté, making it feel more like a Hitchcockian thriller than a conventional romantic drama.  The film's ending is particularly memorable on account of Lubtchansky's inspired work and is pure film noir, a hauntingly dreamlike inversion of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that is both darkly erotic and deeply unsettling, and yet also very poetic.  Throughout the film, Lubtchansky's sombre cinematography is beautifully complemented by Georges Delerue's haunting romantic score, which subtly evokes the deadly passions that are raging beneath the surface of everyday normality.

The film's apparent simplicity belies its psychological depth and emotional complexity, which is a testament to both Truffaut's skill as a director (by this time he had surely attained the maturity of other masters such as Bergman and Hitchcock) and the talent of his lead actors.  Fanny Ardant is extraordinary in her first significant film role.  With great subtlety, she makes us viscerally aware of the poisonous desires that are slowly devouring her character like a hungry cancer, dragging her remorselessly towards the abyss.  Her harrowing portrayal of a woman being consumed by love is well-matched by Depardieu, who lives up to his reputation as France's finest film actor of the period.  Clothed in a childlike vulnerability, Depardieu's character is helpless in the face of the amorous onslaught that his lover unleashes and he is both pitiful and terrifying as he fails to come to grips with a destructive love obsession.  Ardant and Depardieu compel us to share their characters' torment, to feel the intensity of their emotions, and yet somehow they remain distant, unfathomable, like ghosts in a dream.  We are almost afraid to get too close to them.

This distancing of the spectator from the subject was something that Truffaut felt was essential for the film, to prevent it from resembling an ordinary cosy melodrama.  The way he achieves this is by framing the film, adding a prologue and epilogue in which one of the supporting characters, Madame Jouve (superbly played by Véronique Silver) speaks directly to the camera and dispassionately lead us into and out of the drama.  As a consequence, the character of Madame Jouve assumes a much greater significance in the film - she is the fixed point around which the story revolves.  We see Bernard and Mathilde's amour fou in relation to the one which Madame Jouve has already experienced, one that has left her emotionally scarred and very nearly crippled.  The fact that Madame Jouve survived her own emotional crisis and is now fully in control of her life leaves us with a glimmer of hope.  Contrary to what the film's tragic ending might suggest, the madness can be overcome.  It is possible to survive love.

Film Synopsis

Bernard and Arlette Coudray are a young couple who live with their infant son at a remote country house near to Grenoble.  One day, another couple. Philippe and Mathilde Bauchard, move into the house next door to theirs.  Unbeknown to their respective spouses, Mathilde and Bernard were once lovers and their chance meeting unsettles them both.  At first, Bernard goes out of his way to avoid Mathilde, but it is not long before long-buried passions resurface and the two are driven to resume their destructive love affair.  Bernard becomes increasingly possessive of his former lover who, caught by conflicting desires, teeters on the brink of a nervous breakdown.  Neither Bernard nor Mathilde appears able to withstand the emotional whirlwind which they have unleashed...