François Truffaut’s fourth feature (directly following Jules et Jim), was initially a disappointment to critics who had expected something more strikingly innovative from the enfant terrible of the French New Wave. Over the years, however, the reputation of Silken Skin (La Peau douce) has grown. Now acclaimed as one of Truffaut’s subtlest and most insightful films, it is released by the BFI to selected cinemas.
What Truffaut had set out to make was – in his own words –“a story of adultery - very realistic, which will give an antipoetic idea of love, the reverse in a way of Jules et Jim, like a polemical reply.”
Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) is a somewhat unprepossessing middle-aged ‘man of letters’ and minor media celebrity who lives in a fashionable Paris apartment (Truffaut’s own) with his wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti) and young daughter Sabine. While on a trip to Lisbon to deliver a lecture on ‘Balzac and Money’, he embarks on an affair with Nicole, a beautiful air-stewardess half his age. The independent, self-possessed young woman is sensitively portrayed by Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s elder sister, who was to die tragically in a car crash in 1967).
Back in Paris, Pierre and Nicole continue to see each other but are constrained by the need to conceal their relationship from his forceful, passionate wife – who is intent on rekindling the flames of their marriage - and by Pierre’s timidity and clumsiness in dealing with the many obstacles that stand in their way. Obsessed with his lover and irritated by his wife – while somehow managing to misread both women - Pierre is a man increasingly out of his depth.
Although Truffaut was condemned for making the kind of bourgeois melodrama that had once seemed anathema to him, his treatment of adultery in Silken Skin was deliberately unconventional – a dark, unsentimental, startlingly true-to-life portrayal of the petty frustrations and practical problems of an illicit affair. The romantic lyricism of Jules et Jim is here replaced by a more rigorous, detached style, while the script – co-written with Jean-Louis Richard (who has a wickedly funny cameo as a creep who accosts Pierre’s wife in the street) – was inspired by a number of authentic newspaper reports which combined with autobiography and fiction to create a single story.
Featuring beautifully nuanced performances, the precise black-and-white cinematography of Raoul Coutard, and one of Georges Delerue’s most memorable scores, Silken Skin is psychologically astute, suspenseful, packed with telling detail and laced with black humour – showing just how much the brilliant young director had learned from his idols Renoir and Hitchcock.
Film: Silken Skin
Release date: 4th February 2011
Certificate: PG
Running time: 118 mins
Director: François Truffaut
Starring: Jean Desailly, Françoise Dorléac, Nelly Benedetti
Genre: Drama/Romance
Studio: BFI
Format: Cinema
Country: France/Portugal
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