Praise of fragility – Newspaper Kommersant No. 60 (7505) dated 04/07/2023

A mini retrospective of François Truffaut’s films in re-release ends this week with his “Tender Skin”. In this picture, which failed miserably at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, he sees one of the pearls of French cinema Andrey Plakhov.

It was preceded by “Jules and Jim” – a melodrama from the era of decadence and world wars. “Delicate skin” at first glance looks less complicated, even rustic. Meanwhile, this yet another “declaration of love” without historical costumes, without a genre shift, in an ordinary bourgeois shell does not become less mysterious or, according to the director’s definition, less “terrible”.

Jeanne Moreau played in Jules and Jim, and Francoise Dorléac starred in Truffaut’s Delicate Skin. She played the flight attendant Nicole – “changeable, like summer weather, and unstoppable, like a jet liner”: this is how one of the journalists of the 1960s described this heroine. During a business trip to Lisbon, Professor Pierre Lashnet, a specialist in Balzac, falls in love with a flight attendant. They try to maintain a relationship in Paris, but the girl suddenly leaves at a time when the professor’s wife already knows about everything. She hides a gun under her cloak and goes to a cafe to take revenge on her unfaithful spouse.

It would have been an ordinary melodrama if not for Dorleac and Truffaut. They met in 1962 – and also during a business trip: a group of French filmmakers was invited to Israel. The situation is like in “Delicate Skin”: although Truffaut has just divorced, his ex-wife Madeleine Morgenstern hopes to return him and hates her husband’s new girlfriends. Francois and Francoise are brought together not only by the name, but also by the love for the books they exchange. Françoise is making a career with might and main: yesterday’s Dior fashion model, today she is going to Brazil to star with Jean-Paul Belmondo in “The Man from Rio”, tomorrow she will have a role with Truffaut, who, of course, is in love with her and writes letters to her, deliberately making a mistake in her name, which now sounds like “Framboise”, that is, “Raspberry”.

Of course, Dorléac doesn’t play himself in Soft Skin, and Truffaut doesn’t describe their relationship. He built the plot on his other, already completed, novel, but, undoubtedly, a new feeling animates this plot. His alter ego, a soft-skinned intellectual, is played by Jean Desailly, whom Truffaut clearly dislikes. And he enjoys reciprocity: a typical case of a jealous and distrustful relationship between a director who is in love with his actress, and an actor who is entrusted to be “acting” – that is, to play love on behalf and on behalf.

Still, the movie is excellent. Dorleac, standing on the airstairs in a tweed suit, on thin stilettos and a silk scarf inflated by the wind, embodies the charm and mystery of the “new wave”. Every frame of this black-and-white film is a finesse beyond the 1960s that post-1960s cinema could never achieve. The tenderness of the skin and the fragility of human matter speak of how difficult, almost impossible, to maintain a balance of feelings, to avoid mistakes and insults. Together with the departed Nicole-Dorleac, the Balzac specialist loses everything, and parting with life after that is not at all scary. Therefore, the film is sad, but not tragic: the worst has already happened.

Tender Skin is released at Cannes at the same time as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and at first glance, Truffaut’s inexplicable failure is obvious next to the triumph of Jacques Demy. Although no film is better or worse than the other: they are just different, like Francoise Dorléac playing in these films and her younger sister Catherine, who originally had the same surname, and then changed it to Deneuve. Their clash – films and actresses – marked the crisis of the “new wave” and the reassessment of its values. In this renewed value system, Deneuve, with her classic “monolithic” type, is more appropriate than Dorleac, with her nervous volatility.

Deneuve did not play in “Tender Skin”, she only occasionally came to the shooting to support her sister. Soft Skin came out in 1964. Appreciating Francoise Truffaut’s talent, he prophesied a great future for her and promised to shoot her every six years, jokingly appointing her dates in 1970, 1976 and 1982. At this number he stopped. Truffaut will die in 1984, Dorléac will die in a car accident very soon after “Tender Skin”, in 1967. Instead, another Mademoiselle Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve, will come on dates. Arrives at almost scheduled time. For three years she would become Truffaut’s life partner. She would star in his films Mississippi Siren (1969) and The Last Subway (1980). The first can still be attributed to the relapses of the “new wave”, the second is just a classic.