General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Green Room

The Green Room (La Chambre verte) is a 1978 French drama film written, directed by, and starring François Truffaut, adapted from short stories by the American novelist Henry James. Truffaut plays Julien Davenne, a provincial journalist haunted by the deaths of his wife and his friends, who dedicates a room of his house, and later a restored chapel, to the memory of the dead.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and lead	François Truffaut, who also plays Julien Davenne¹
Screenplay	François Truffaut and Jean Gruault, from Henry James stories³
Literary sources	"The Altar of the Dead", "The Beast in the Jungle", and "The Friends of the Friends"³
French release	Visa no. 43535 dated 15 March 1978; theatrical release 5 April 1978¹
Running time	96 min per the CNC visa record; 94 min per BFI and Cinémathèque québécoise listings¹^•⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Néstor Almendros; music Maurice Jaubert; production Les Films du Carrosse and Les Productions Artistes Associés⁵
Principal cast	François Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, Jean Dasté, Jean-Pierre Moulin, Antoine Vitez⁶

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in eastern France about ten years after the First World War. Julien Davenne, marked by the war in which he lost his companions, lives with the memory of those he loved and lost: his wife Julie, who died before his return from the front, and friends killed in battle. At the newspaper where he works he is assigned the obituary columns, and at home he maintains a room devoted to the cult of his dead wife, furnished with her photographs and belongings.⁷^•⁸

At an auction sale, while searching for a silver ring that belonged to his wife, Davenne meets Cécilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye), a young woman carrying griefs of her own. His obsession expands to embrace other departed friends and heroes. He finds a disused chapel, restores it, and, with the eventual acquiescence of the ecclesiastical authorities, turns it into a sanctuary filled with candles, each dedicated to one of the dead. Cécilia joins him in this devotion, though Davenne does not know whom she mourns; he eventually discovers that her candle honors Paul Massigny, once his own best friend, who had betrayed him.⁹

Davenne's household includes a housekeeper and Georges, a deaf-mute boy whom he teaches to speak, a figure that echoes Truffaut's earlier The Wild Child.⁷^•⁹ In the chapel's iconography Truffaut hung portraits of artists he admired, including Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Jean Cocteau.⁷

From Henry James to the screenplay

La Chambre verte was the last completed screenplay of the Truffaut–Jean Gruault partnership, the team behind Jules et Jim and The Story of Adèle H. The basic storyline comes from "The Altar of the Dead", a James story Truffaut discovered in 1970 and decided to adapt in 1974. Gruault worked on a first version in 1974 and 1975, after which Truffaut suspended the writing for a year and a half. He had it resumed in the autumn of 1976, introducing themes from two other James stories, "The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Friends of the Friends". Revised several times, the final screenplay was completed in October 1977, in the days before shooting.¹⁰

Truffaut placed the film in a specific line of his own work: "For me, La Chambre verte belongs to a family of films that includes Fahrenheit 451, The Wild Child, and Adèle H. The dead in it are like the books of Fahrenheit; one strives to bring inert things to life, the living breathe into them their own breath, their own passions."¹⁰ He described the film as a tribute to "all those whose lives have left a deep trace", adding: "it's the idea that the power of memory, devotion and obsession is stronger than current events... I refuse to forget."⁸

A scholarly article published by the CNRS research unit THALIM argues that, beyond the acknowledged James adaptation, the film is above all a secret remake of Abel Gance's Paradis perdu (1940), reading it as a movement from the cult of the dead to the cult of cinema.¹¹

Production and style

The film was produced by Les Films du Carrosse and Les Productions Artistes Associés, with Truffaut as producer. Néstor Almendros photographed it in color in a 1.66:1 format, and the score uses music by Maurice Jaubert, the composer who died in 1940 and whose work Truffaut had already used posthumously in The Story of Adèle H., Small Change, and The Man Who Loved Women. Editing is credited to Martine Barraqué, Jean Gargonne, and Michel Klochendler, and the English subtitles were by Helen G. Scott.⁵^•⁷

Critics of the time noted the film's austere, candlelit imagery and its deliberate distance from the realism of much contemporary French cinema. One 1978 review described it as "a pure and timeless story built in the form of a tale", another as "sinister and beautiful, incantatory and unbearable, all at once".¹²

Release and reception

The film received its French visa on 15 March 1978 and opened in French cinemas on 5 April 1978, classified for all audiences.¹ In the United States it was released by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, with the copyright registered in 1981 for the film version and in 1982 for the English-subtitled version.⁵

Reception was divided. In The New Yorker in 1979, the writer Donald Barthelme, reviewing the film, reported that it had been hissed at some European showings and attributed the hostility to the way the film "from the beginning excludes the viewer"; he also noted that no love affair develops between Julien and Cécilia, who is, as May Bartram is in "The Beast in the Jungle", what the man misses.⁹ In Cahiers du cinéma, however, Pascal Bonitzer's May 1978 review, the magazine's first coverage of Truffaut's work after a long silence, called it "the most beautiful, the most profound of François Truffaut's films".¹³ French daily critics were similarly split: Jean de Baroncelli in Le Monde wrote that the film is "not a reflection on death. It is a concrete, almost prosaic film. The account of a (singular) lived experience... above all the story of a mad love", while other reviewers found Truffaut's own performance stiff and distant.¹² A Time Out review judged Truffaut's acting range unequal to the script's prose.¹⁴

The film has since been reappraised as one of Truffaut's most personal works. Le Monde reported in 2014 that it took La Chambre verte, in 1978, for Truffaut to make the cover of the Cahiers.¹⁵ The film also marked a turning point for Nathalie Baye, who after notable supporting appearances became, through this role, a leading actress.¹⁶

Distribution and restoration

The CNC distribution record shows the film passing through a series of French distributors: SADP (1990–1995), AFMD (1995–2005), MK2 Diffusion (2000–2003) and MK2 Films (2004–2013), Diaphana Distribution (2013–2021), Carlotta Films (2021–2025), and MK2 Films again from October 2025.¹ MK2 Films carried out a 4K restoration from the original image and sound negatives, with the support of Arte France.¹⁷ The restored version has been screened at cinematheques including the Cinémathèque québécoise and the Cinémathèque suisse.²

Truffaut died on 21 October 1984 at the age of 52, six years after the film's release.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1970s › Released 1975 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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