THE GREEN ROOM Movie Review

La Chambre Verte

For hard-core fans of the films of the late François Truffaut, The Green Room can be an extraordinarily moving and powerful experience. But even some Truffaut fanatics may have their patience tested by this adaptation of Henry James's The Altar of the Dead, the story of a man whose obsession with death became his life. Beginning with Two English Girls in 1972, many of Truffaut's films embraced a new intensity and darkness that took him into unexplored emotional territory. He went very far in this regard in his 1975 masterpiece The Story of Adele H., but goes all the way with it—uncompromisingly—in The Green Room. In the film, Truffaut himself takes the role of a French journalist who, following the First World War, writes obituaries for a newspaper. But writing about the dead isn't enough for him, and the physical altar that he builds as a monument to the dead—his late wife as well as others—becomes all that he lives for. The woman who falls in love with him (Nathalie Baye) is unable to get through to him, precisely because she is so very much alive. (It's a bit reminiscent of one of Truffaut's favorite movies, Vertigo, in that the Jimmy Stewart character there was obsessed with the image of a “dead” woman, later rejecting the actual woman when he found she was alive.) Fact and fiction are blended here, in that the altar itself contains photos of people who were important to Truffaut the director, rather than Truffaut the character; one of them, composer Maurice Jaubert, was “resurrected” by Truffaut when he used the late composer's compositions in The Story of Adele H., as well as in The Green Room. These elements all run together, and now, with Truffaut's own death at 53, the film becomes both a touchstone and the most difficult to watch of his films.(It may be doubly difficult to watch because the picture is so dark physically—images that were barely visible on screen may not be visible at all on video.)

NEXT STOP… The Story of Adele H., Forbidden Games, Vertigo

1978 (PG) 9Sm/C FR Antoine Vitez, Jane Lobre, Marcel Berbert, Francois Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, Jean Daste; D: Francois Truffaut; W: Jean Gruault; C: Nestor Almendros; M: Maurice Jaubert. VHS MGM