'Silken Skin' and 'Day for Night': Two Truffaut Films Worth Watching

I've been doing a bit of reading around the Nouvelle Vague of late, with Emilie Bickerton's comprehensive chronological history of the Cahiers Du Cinema the book I'm currently reading. So it was a happy coincidence that the Duke of York's recently put on a Francois Truffaut double-bill featuring two films I'd never seen before: 1964 thriller 'Silken Skin' - also know as 'The Soft Skin' - and 'Day for Night', which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1973. Below are mini-reviews of both:

Silken Skin (La Peau Douce)


'Silken Skin' is about a French literary celebrity, Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly), who takes a business trip to Lisbon, where me meets a young air hostess (Françoise Dorléac) with whom he falls deeply in love. The majority of the film concerns Pierre sneaking away from his wife (Nelly Benedetti) to hook-up with his mistress, before he is eventually caught in a lie and has to make a decision.

It all seems simple, even banal, enough - a straightforward relationship drama. Yet Truffaut shoots the whole thing as if in homage to his idol Hitchcock and it plays like a thriller. The music is foreboding and the over-the-shoulder shots of people driving are reminiscent of 'Psycho', with the whole thing building to a powerful climax which is all the more striking due to the director's knowing refusal to forecast it during the preceding events (Truffaut was far too well schooled in Hitchcock for the abrupt ending to have been a result of structural deficiency).

It's seemingly a film about a cheating, nihilistic, self-satisfied husband - a man who tells his women what to wear - but 'Silken Skin' ultimately turns out to be about the women, as it cleverly subverts your expectations. It's also every bit as human as something like 'The 400 Blows', and though it's played straight for the most part, the film is not lacking in its directors subversive, darkly comic sensibility.

Day for Night (La nuit américaine)


When Jean-Luc Godard commented on the falseness of the motion picture industry in films like 'Tout Va Bien' (1972) (the credits of which feature a producer writing cheques to the cast and crew), it was tinged with bitterness and cynicism. On the other hand, Truffaut made 'Day for Night' just a year later - the quintessential movie about making movies - with a great sense of fun. Above all else, the film is entertaining. Visually it is a splendid, brightly coloured precursor to Wes Anderson, who most certainly paid homage to the film in his American Express advert - basically a riff on Truffaut's role as director within the movie, forever fielding questions from his crew and making decisions. (Though Anderson also borrows liberally from Godard and 'Tout Va Bien' in particular in his work.)

The film boasts some fantastic tracking shots too, but Truffaut never showboats without pulling back and making a joke at his own expense - and at the expense of the art form. It's always clear that he held cinema in the greatest reverence, but he was also able to channel that love into this high-spirited, good-natured look at the process and the industry.

The film is about the making of a movie, but the movie is beset by problems, feuds, death and even by a kitten who can't drink milk on cue (in a hilarious nod to an identical shot in 'Silken Skin'). Truffaut invites us into the kitchen and shows us how the sausage is made - and in a way which, for me at least, is far more fun than Fellini's '8 1/2'.

It also has a fantastic score, composed by Georges Delerue, which celebrates the wonders of the film making process as we watch sets being constructed or stunts being performed. It's clever without being smug and thoroughly enjoyable from the first minute to the last.

Both these films are deserving of far more attention than these short write-ups here, but I wanted to urge anyone who reads this to seek them out. Fantastic films both.

'Breathless' re-issue review: Back in cinemas and looking good...

Jean-Luc Godard's 'À Bout de Souffle' ('Breathless') may not have been the inaugural film of the French New Wave, coming as it did a year after Truffaut's 'The 400 Blows', but in many ways it has become the most iconic, the image of Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo walking down the Champs-Élysées now synonymous with the influential movement. Boasting a script co-written by Truffaut and Godard it is perhaps an appropriate signifier. Now in its 50th year, the film has been the subject of a restoration and remastering effort and has now been re-released in selected cinemas.

As with the re-releases of 'The Godfather' and 'The Red Shoes' last year, the primary benefit of the restoration is that these old and "important" films are once again available to see as they should be seen: projected on a big screen in a dark room. The new print of 'Breathless' is beautiful and sharp, but as with those other two films (and Kurosawa's 'Rashomon' last month) I was most taken aback by the atmosphere and power the film gained when set back into its original context.



Up on the screen the film can hold your complete attention better than a television can, and this isn't just down to the size of the screen and the darkness of the room. For the most part it is the social experience - more specifically the rules we must follow in a public cinema. You can not (or at least ought not) talk to the person next to or look at your mobile phone. You can not pause to make a cup of tea and you hesitate to leave for the toilet. In the cinema these norms of social behaviour work in favour of the art form: you are there to watch the movie and you watch the movie properly.

Watching it this way you can notice more than you might at home on a DVD. I was able to better appreciate the ingenious and ground-breaking camera techniques, such as the jump-cuts and the long continuous takes. Likewise themes, such as Michel's (Belmondo) obsession with American popular culture and Patricia's (Seberg) obsession with being loved, were more apparent. The characters are not in love with each other, but with images and cultural symbols. "When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other", says Michel near the films climax and he seems to sum up the relationship as it has been. All of it was clearer and better defined in a theatre.



The most extraordinary thing about 'Breathless' is that it opens with a car theft and subsequent murder of a policeman and follows a man on the run, but that this story seems to take a back seat - at times seeming unimportant. Indeed the murder itself is afforded little screen time and is boiled down to the most crucial elements: the trigger being pulled and the body falling dead. Instead, the film is about the central relationship between Patricia and Michel, with elements of crime thriller and Film Noir on the side. For the most part Michel seems relaxed. He walks the streets openly and feels under such limited threat that he even tails a policemen who is looking for him. He continues to steal cars. Late in the film when he learns the police know his whereabouts he makes no sudden movements. He does not run or hide.

Written by two film critics it does not seem like too big a stretch to say that Michel behaves as though he is the self-conscious star of his own film, taking his Boggart obsession to the extreme and living that persona to the last. He is an empty vessel for popular culture. Patricia is no better, she is shown to be vain and disloyal. But if the movie seems cynical about people, it is perhaps more cynical about movies. After all, Godard once said "all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl".

In 'Breathless' there are tons of self-referential in-jokes about film itself: two scenes take place at the cinema, Jean-Pierre Melville makes an appearance and Michel declines to buy an issue of Cahiers Du Cinema (saying he objects to youth). There are also running jokes about language (with Patricia constantly asking Michel what various words mean) and there is even a lot of snappy, pseudo-intellectual, cod philosophy ("Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love").

There is a dubious sexual politics here too, as Michel, like the film's other male characters, is an unapologetic misogynist. Add all of this to the raw beauty of the images and 'Breathless' is certainly a film worthy of discussion and its place in film history. Godard said that he was "destroying all the old principles rather than creating something new" with 'Breathless'. But far from an iconoclast, 'Breathless' is a genuine movie icon. And there is no better place to see it than at the cinema. So catch it whilst you can.

'Breathless' is rated '15' by the BBFC and is on very limited release in selected cinemas across the UK.