The Soft Skin

Towards the end of Soft Skin, Pierre must make an extremely essential phone call. Just at that point a silly looking blond captures the phone booth and Pierre waits impatiently while she completes her call. Director Francois Truffaut has chosen a device so obviously contrived that your entire build-up of tension gets stopped in its tracks.

But then, that's just what the story of Pierre is all about. Pierre, married for fifteen years to Franca, falls impulsively in love with Nicole, a young air-line stewardess, setting up Truffaut's traditional triangle. His love for her proceeds by starts of pure sexual drive and by stops of convention and respectability. Truffaut, to parallel Pierre, turns on the emotion at the level of characterization and turns it off with a plot of continuous cliches. As Pierre becomes increasingly trapped by his situation, the tension between your sympathy and disgust makes you more and more uncomfortable.

Jean Dessaily becomes Pierre as Truffaut gives us detail after detail about this rather effeminate man. We watch him carefully transfer five cigarettes from a near-empty to a near-full pack; we see him count the seconds at a street crossing before the light changes; we observe how carefully he unfolds his newspaper when seated at a cafe. Truffaut has always relied on acting to power his films, but never has he created such intensely cinematic acting, relying on touches far too fine to be visible on the stage.

Pierre lies to his wife about Nicole, lies to Nicole about his wife, and lies to himself about his own duplicity. But Truffaut does not want you merely to observe that the man is dishonest. Instead he places you inside Pierre's own "soft skin" with a series of phony devices forcing you to feel the same kind of sharp checks on the plot that Pierre experiences in his life.

But don't believe for one second that Truffaut has lost his subtlety. In the scene when Nicole finally levels with Pierre as they break up, the director switches to a strikingly original technique. He places them on the top-floor terrace of an uncompleted apartment building, so that Nicole's profile is set against the slightly unfocused background of the Paris skyline. You receive both the sense of her sudden openness and his response of partial dizziness. When Pierre looks down from the edge of the terrace as Nicole drives away in a cab, the impact of their separation becomes terribly intense.

In the closing shots, when Franca shoots Pierre in a cafe, Truffaut has the spectators almost comically rise en masse to disrupt your sympathies once again. The director of The Soft Skin will not permit you your comfortable catharsis. Rather you must leave the theatre with the deepest feeling of hollowness which is far more painful and--I believe--honest.