The Green Room

Truffaut took the lead himself, which he rarely did outside Day for Night, in an adaptation of Henry James — chiefly The Altar of the Dead — set in a small French town in the years after the First World War. It was a commercial failure and he knew it would be. He made it anyway, and it is the most personal film he ever released.

Julien Davenne survived the trenches, lost his wife shortly afterwards, and has organised his life around the dead: he writes obituaries for a failing local paper, keeps a green room in his house given over to his wife's photographs, and grows increasingly impatient with the living for their willingness to forget. Nathalie Baye plays Cécilia, who works at an auction house and turns out to have her own losses to attend to. Nestor Almendros lit it in candle-flame and shadow, and Truffaut plays Davenne with a stiffness that some read as bad acting and others as exactly right for a man who has stopped practising being alive.

Contemporary reviews were poor and audiences stayed away. It has been steadily reassessed since Truffaut's own death in 1984, not least because of how directly it anticipates it. Wes Anderson and Olivier Assayas are among the directors who have named it as the Truffaut they return to. It is a film about the ethics of remembering, and it does not flatter the person doing the remembering.