General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Soft Skin

The Soft Skin (French: La Peau douce) is a 1964 French black-and-white drama directed by François Truffaut about a married literary celebrity whose affair with an air stewardess ends in a crime of passion. It stars Jean Desailly as Pierre Lachenay, Françoise Dorléac as Nicole, and Nelly Benedetti as his wife Franca, and was written by Truffaut with Jean-Louis Richard.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	François Truffaut; screenplay by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard²
Cast	Jean Desailly (Pierre Lachenay), Françoise Dorléac (Nicole), Nelly Benedetti (Franca), Daniel Ceccaldi (Clément)³
Release	France, 20 April 1964; presented at Cannes and designated by André Malraux to represent France officially at the festival⁴^•⁵
Format	Black and white, 1.66:1, about 117–118 minutes³
Key crew	Cinematography Raoul Coutard, music Georges Delerue, editing Claudine Bouché²
Inspiration	Truffaut said he based the film on the character of Pierre Jaccoud as known from the accounts of his trial⁶
Reception	A flop on release that gradually gained a cult reputation and was reevaluated by critics⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Pierre Lachenay, a well-known publisher, literary critic, and lecturer, is married to Franca and father of a young daughter, Sabine. Traveling to Lisbon to lecture on Balzac, he meets Nicole, the air hostess on his flight, who is staying at the same hotel. He is captivated by her youth and she by his culture and reputation, and they become lovers.⁸^•⁹

The film follows the logistics of the affair: furtive weekends away, telephone calls, near-misses, and the social embarrassments of concealment. When Franca learns of the liaison, Pierre announces that he wants a divorce, then hesitates, living alone and visiting his wife and mistress in turn while putting off the moment of choice. In the film's conclusion he is killed in a restaurant by his wife just as he was considering returning to married life.⁸^•²

Origins and intent

Truffaut described the subject as "the most banal subject in the world: him, her, the other," and said his idea was to make a film about adultery inspired by the character of Pierre Jaccoud, a man strong in social life but weak in love who, at forty-four, becomes increasingly caught in an inescapable spiral. He wanted the film to resemble the faits divers (short news items about odd crimes and accidents), the crime items everyone reads in the press, because they fascinate by mixing fiction and life; he called the film's world "the universe of Simenon," the most everyday there is.⁶

He explained his methods in the same interview: the lovers' scenes are treated in a oneiric climate corresponding to the state of being in love, while the marital scenes are played with almost excessive violence to give the everyday a tragic dimension. The ending, he said, draws on other crimes of passion, and he felt certain the story had to go to the extreme of the spiral, where death lies. He also chose a stewardess rather than a secretary so he could film an adventure in transit, with airplane scenes, something he noted the cinema rarely shows.⁶

Style and production

Truffaut made the film while he was assembling his book of lengthy interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, and critics have consistently noted the Hitchcock influence in the precision and pace of the compositions and cutting, alongside a James M. Cain-style fatalism in which small accidents, a plane caught by minutes, a phone call delayed too long, have major consequences.⁷^•³ The Rough Guide to Film describes it as cut, framed, and scored like Hitchcock yet full of the humanistic foibles of Renoir.¹⁰

Raoul Coutard, who had also shot Truffaut's Jules and Jim, was the cinematographer, and Georges Delerue wrote the score; a later account by the composer Alexandre Desplat points out that the film opens with joyful dialogue over melancholy music that anticipates the drama to come.¹¹^•¹² The production companies were Les Films du Carrosse and Sedif, with Marcel Berbert, António da Cunha Telles, and Truffaut as producers.²^•³ A small recurring detail: Nicole's Lisbon hotel room is number 813, a number that returns in five other Truffaut films and refers to an Arsène Lupin story of 1910.¹³

Reception and reassessment

The film was badly received on its release. The Guardian's DVD review calls it a resounding flop that has gradually gained a cult reputation, and explains the initial failure: where audiences expected warmth and humanism from Truffaut, they got a dispassionate look at adultery with no character to admire.⁷ A 1984 Le Monde retrospective likewise records that the film, a bourgeois adultery story ending in a drama, was poorly received.¹⁴

Over the years critics reevaluated it. Turner Classic Movies notes that many now agree with the handful of 1964 critics who called it a masterpiece, quoting Tim Robey's "stunningly assured, suspenseful, emotionally truthful and tough," J. Hoberman's "one of Truffaut's best," and Philip French's judgment that it is the film in which Truffaut cast off the showy trappings of the early Nouvelle Vague and became a truly mature filmmaker.¹⁵ The Criterion Collection released it on home video as Spine #749, calling it an underseen French New Wave treasure.³

The film is also tied to the short career of Françoise Dorléac, elder sister of Catherine Deneuve, who died in a car crash in 1967, three years after the film was made; her performance as Nicole remains one of the most cited reasons to seek the film out.⁷^•⁹ A restored version by mk2 Films was screened in the Venice Classics section of the 2024 Venice Biennale.²

Place in Truffaut's work

La Peau douce followed the international success of Jules and Jim (1962) and marks a deliberate turn in tone. Truffaut himself framed the contrast: Jules and Jim said one can love two women at once, while La Peau douce claims the opposite, moving from idealized love to the most everyday reality.⁶ Critics group it with the films of rare violence of feeling in which the beloved seems both indispensable and inaccessible, alongside The Two English Girls and The Woman Next Door.¹⁶ Truffaut later said he had kept a bad memory of shooting the film in Paris and wished he had been able to shoot elsewhere.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 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

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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