La femme d’à côté [The Woman Next Door] *** (1981, Gérard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Henri Garcin) – Classic Movie Review 3022

Writer-director François Truffaut’s 1981 romantic drama is his 20^th and penultimate film, which reteams him with Gérard Depardieu from his previous movie, The Last Metro (1980).

Depardieu stars as a marine engineer called Bernard Coudray, who moves with his wife (Michèle Baumgartner) and family to an affluent village in rural France. There he discovers that the woman next door is Mathilde (Fanny Ardant), a former lover, now newly married to Philippe Bauchard (Henri Garcin). Naturally, forbidden passion ensues, like night follows day.

Director Truffaut’s stately tale of illicit love unfolds against the tennis foursomes and dinner-parties of middle-class life, the lovers’ doomed passion contrasting with the petty concerns of their neighbours.

While a touch too laid-back, undynamic and underplotted to rank as a classic Truffaut movie, it is still a typically impressive piece, poised, carefully observed and lovingly crafted, with tremendous acting from its two stars.

Also in the cast are Véronique Silver, Roger Van Hool, Olivier Becquaert and Philippe Morier-Genoud.

Classic Movie Review 3022