The Green Room [La chambre verte] **** (1978, François Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, Jean Dasté) – Classic Movie Review 2297

Director François Truffaut casts himself as Julien Davenne, a provincial journalist in a little French town at the end of the 1920s. He’s an obituary writer obsessively looking back on the death of his wife Julie died a decade ago and the deaths of his friends in World War One. The Green Room itself is his candle-lit shrine to the dead. He can’t let go.

He has gathered into the Green Room all of Julie’s objects, but a fire destroys the room, prompting him to renovate a little chapel and devote it to Julie and the other dead people he celebrates.

Truffaut’s shamefully undervalued 1978 film, which unusually bypassed UK arthouse cinemas and went straight to TV in Britain, is a labour of love and homage, based on two Henry James short stories, The Altar of the Dead and The Beast of the Jungle.

This film about death obsession is naturally, or maybe unnaturally, morbid and obsessive, but at the same time it is beautiful and deeply moving. It is a key work in the Truffaut 21-movie collection, and now, since his death on October 21 1984, aged only 52, it his bequest to us and our inheritance. It should of course be desperately depressing, and it some ways it is, but it is full of amazing grace.

As in L’Enfant Sauvage or Close Encounters, Truffaut shows what an instinctive, intelligent and charismatic actor he could be, holding the screen compellingly. Also in the cast are Nathalie Baye, Jean Dasté, Jean-Pierre Moulin, Antoine Vitez, Jane Lobre, Patrick Maléon, Jean-Pierre Ducos and Annie Miller.

It is exquisitely written by Truffaut and Jean Gruault, beautifully photographed by Nestor Almendros and lovingly scored by Maurice Jaubert. It was filmed at Caen and Honfleur in Calvados, and at The Chapel, Fiquefleur-Equainville, Eure.

The photographs on the chapel wall are of Truffaut’s friends and idols, such as Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, Guillaume Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, Maurice Jaubert and source story author Henry James.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2297

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