The Woman Next Door

Truffaut's penultimate film, made in 1981, cast Fanny Ardant — who became his partner — opposite Gérard Depardieu, then at the height of his powers. It is the last and most concentrated of his films about erotic obsession, and it is structured like a thriller even though nothing criminal occurs.

Bernard has a wife, a child, a job at a marine engineering firm and a house on a quiet road near Grenoble. A couple move in opposite. The woman is Mathilde, with whom he had a violent affair years before. Both are married; both decide to say nothing; the two couples begin having dinner together. Truffaut frames the geography obsessively — two front doors, a shared driveway, windows facing windows — and has the story narrated in retrospect by a third party, the manager of the local tennis club, which puts a frame of inevitability around everything from the first minute.

Ardant gives a performance of enormous nervous force, and the film's proposition is genuinely bleak: that this kind of attachment is not a feeling to be managed but a condition, and that being reasonable adults about it changes nothing. Critics recognised it immediately as a return to form after a run of lighter work. Truffaut died three years later; this and The Green Room are where his late seriousness lives.