Truffaut filmed La Peau Douce immediately after the international success of "Jules et Jim". Released at the heyday of the nouvelle vague, critics and audiences panned the film as a futile resort to bourgeois classicism after the unconventional antics of his previous masterwork.
They could not have been more mistaken. Time has treated La Peau Douce better than most of his later efforts. It is definitely a triumph of direction with each scene being carefully planned and meticulously structured, not unlike a Hitchcock movie. In practice, Truffaut transposes Hitchcock's mechanisms of suspense into a seemingly trivial story concerning the illicit love affair of a distinguished editor/author with a younger stewardess and its withering consequences. The characters and the milieu of the story are effortless evoked, but the main joy is derived from the visual inventiveness that Truffaut shows in scene after scene. It's a triumph of a purely cinematic mode of expression, which Truffaut was one of the few who had really mastered it.
They could not have been more mistaken. Time has treated La Peau Douce better than most of his later efforts. It is definitely a triumph of direction with each scene being carefully planned and meticulously structured, not unlike a Hitchcock movie. In practice, Truffaut transposes Hitchcock's mechanisms of suspense into a seemingly trivial story concerning the illicit love affair of a distinguished editor/author with a younger stewardess and its withering consequences. The characters and the milieu of the story are effortless evoked, but the main joy is derived from the visual inventiveness that Truffaut shows in scene after scene. It's a triumph of a purely cinematic mode of expression, which Truffaut was one of the few who had really mastered it.