François Truffaut’s The Soft Skin (1964) at first glance seems to tell a story of infidelity, yet it is, in truth, an exquisite study of form, time, and the act of seeing. Unlike the vibrant energy of the French New Wave, Truffaut turns here toward silence, order, and the details of modern life. Having conducted his long conversation with Hitchcock the year before, Truffaut pays homage to his mentor through every shot of this film. Camera movements, MacGuffins, motifs, and meticulously composed frames distance him from his earlier work, Truffaut slowly steps away from the New Wave toward a cinema of mature precision.
He depicts infidelity differently: desire and the void of solitude amid the hum of modernity, not through dialogue or sentiment, but through the rhythm of images and the movement of the camera.
The film opens with a close-up of two hands under the opening credits،hands that touch, yet remain apart. This contrast between contact and distance is the film’s very geometry. The hands of the man and woman keep shifting, and even in their apparent closeness, emptiness persists between them،a visual redefinition of marriage in the modern world. The use of enclosed architecture،corridors, elevators, confined interiors,constructs a visual form of doubt, hesitation, and suffocation. Throughout the film, objects and body fragments (hands, feet, shoes, glass) replace the wholeness of the body; Truffaut divides desire into parts, revealing how, in the modern world, even love is fragmented and incomplete.
Among all moments, the elevator sequence forms the film’s beating heart,the silent birth of desire.
A respectable writer ascends in an elevator with a pilot and a stewardess. Their friendly intimacy feels effortless, modern, and fleeting,a world of casual warmth without attachment. Jean Desailly, playing Pierre Lachenay, the author and literary critic en route to Lisbon to lecture on Balzac, observes them quietly, sensing for the first time a physical and emotional lack he had never acknowledged.
The elevator ascends from the first to the eighth floor over roughly ninety seconds,a stretched moment showing how desire is born from delay and anticipation. On the return, however, only the man remains in frame, and the descent lasts just six seconds,real time, cold and mechanical. The long ascent builds desire; the swift descent seals solitude.
Soon, the camera shifts to the man’s point of view in the hallway. In front of each door lies one or two pairs of shoes,signs of presence, intimacy, and touch. The hallway is silent, but Georges Delerue’s delicate score murmurs beneath it, like the man’s inner voice. Behind the closed doors, contact and warmth exist; in their midst, he feels his isolation. Entering his room, he finds two beds,but only one occupant. Two beds, one person: the image condenses all that the film has explored,presence and absence, desire and silence, travel and loneliness.
Truffaut neither condemns nor excuses infidelity; he merely watches. His cinema is about seeing without judgment,about a man who has always lived under the gaze of others, a shy, family-loving intellectual now searching for a relationship that only gains meaning in secrecy. The boundary he crosses with his new lover is not merely moral but existential,a passage from tradition and social law toward the instability of modern desire. In this shifting world, even betrayal has changed meaning.
And precisely at this point, Truffaut reinvents cinema. Each scene of The Soft Skin is a lesson in filmmaking,especially the café sequence in Reims, where Lachenay, through his gaze, reconstructs cinema itself. His face, framed by the reflection in the café window,a screen between him and Nicole,pauses, then pierces the glass, reaching depth. Within that gaze, doubt, anxiety, and a trace of jealousy ripple through his expression.
The brilliance of Truffaut lies in the synchronized choreography between Lachenay’s head movements and Nicole’s gestures, while we remain guided solely by his look. A few perfectly timed cuts shift the perspective,where cinema reveals itself as camera, cut, and mise-en-scène.
Here, Hitchcock’s influence is visible, yet at the core, Eisenstein triumphs over Bazin,montage conquers realism. Truffaut, by exposing the mechanical nature of objects,piano, gramophone, lamps,points directly to cinema’s own machinery, where modernity is laid bare, and theatre transforms into film.
