THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR Movie Review
La Femme d'a Cote
With The Woman Next Door in 1981, François Truffaut dared to create a picture that was both deeply felt and unashamedly romantic. Truffaut had just completed The Last Metro to wide acclaim and boxoffice success, and while the movie was thoroughly honorable, there was an emotional artificiality about it that felt calculated, dry, and passionless. But The Woman Next Door, the story of a suburban husband (Gerard Depardieu) who resumes an affair with a married ex-lover (Fanny Ardant) who moves next door, is nothing but risk. It's a vertiginous, swoony story of uncontrollable, rekindled passion, which audiences either tend to respond to quite deeply or hoot off the screen. Some of the negative response to the film stemmed from the physical screen presence of Ardant (who was Truffaut's lover at the time), one of the few women in movies who looks voracious enough to devour Depardieu for breakfast and still down a couple of Pop-Tarts. But much of the dismissal of this picture came, I think, from some degree of embarrassment on the part of critics at the picture's ruthless emotional force. No “cute” coincidences or wacky situations come out of the woodwork to save these people from their obsessions; they can't see a way out of their dilemma, and they go all the way with their unending sexual need to the point where their feelings are no longer tolerable. The Woman Next Door is built on some of the same themes as Truffaut's The Story of Adele H., but that was a love story about one person, and could be viewed more easily as an individual case study in madness. The Woman Next Door is cloaked as a far more traditional romance, but it's also a cautionary, “be careful what you wish for” scenario that can have you squirming in your seat with either relief that that isn't you up on the screen, or with envy because you wish it were.
NEXT STOP … The Story of Adele H., The Soft Skin, Vertigo
1981 (R) 106m/C FR Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Michele Baumgartner, Veronique Silver, Roger Van Hool; D: Francois Truffaut; W: Suzanne Schiffman; M: Georges Delerue. VHS, LV HMV, FOX