The Soft Skin

Truffaut followed Jules et Jim, one of the most romantic films ever made about a love triangle, with the least romantic film imaginable about the same subject. The Soft Skin went into the Cannes competition in 1964 and was badly received; it is now widely held to be among his best.

Pierre Lachenay is a literary editor and lecturer, comfortable, admired, married to Franca and father to a small daughter. On a trip to Lisbon he meets an air hostess, Nicole, played by Françoise Dorléac, and the affair begins with the pressing of a lift button. Truffaut films it as a procedure: keys, corridors, timetables, the mechanics of finding somewhere to be unobserved, phone boxes, the precise choreography of a man lying. Raoul Coutard shoots in crisp monochrome and Georges Delerue's score keeps promising a romance the images decline to deliver.

Hitchcock's influence is everywhere — Truffaut was conducting his famous interviews with him at the time — but applied to adultery rather than murder, so that the suspense is entirely about whether a man will be caught in a small lie. Contemporary critics wanted the lyricism of the earlier films. What they got was a cold, exact study of middle-class self-deception, and the passage of sixty years has made it look less like a misstep and more like the most clear-eyed thing he did.