Imprisonment

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR Directed by Franc,ois Truffaut Screenplay by Franc,ois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel

One hears stories like this when sitting around at the tennis club, or some similarly benign place, of an August afternoon. They are no more than extended anecdotes, these tales, but spun out at a certain lazy length with persuasive details added by a sympathetic storyteller, they sometimes cling to the mind in a way that grander works do not. Reminding us that quite ordinary lives can be overwhelmed by extraordinary passions, these domestic dramas often thrill their listeners with romantic openings only to chill them with bleak conclusions.

So it is with Franc,ois Truffaut's The Woman Next Door. "Yes, that's the way these things often go," one says, thinking back over the film in those mulling moments so kindly provided by traffic jams and checkout-counter lines. Indeed, one rather imagines it was blank moments like those that kept Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) and Mathilde (Fanny Ardant, a particularly lovely newcomer) alive in each other's minds between the bitter breakup of their tumultuous romance and their next meeting, seven years later. This occurs when Mathilde and her new husband happen to move in next door to the house Bernard occupies serenely with his wife and child. Civility and discretion quickly fail. Bernard is determined to return their relationship to its old obsessive level. When Mathilde resists emotional imprisonment, he creates a scandalous scene at a party. The incident cauterizes his wounds, but it opens hers. This role reversal leads to her breakdown, and to the film's surprisingly tragic denouement.

Truffaut has always been fascinated by the destructive potential of obsessed love. He handles it here with a detachment that never becomes dispassion, a generous and evenhanded sympathy for both its victims that is not allowed to slip into melodrama, satire or even irony. This time, in fact, he provides a surrogate for himself in the person of an older woman, Mme. Jouve (Veronique Silver), the manager of the tennis club where much of the action takes place. She is gray, like the subdued light of the film itself. She is quotidian in her concerns, as Truffaut is in the selection of the details by which he illuminates the good, separate lives the lovers begin to jeopardize. And, since Mme. Jouve once literally crippled herself for love, she has earned the right, which she does not exercise, to comment either bitterly or smugly about the dangers Bernard and Mathilde court by courting. Indeed, the script provides an opportunity for her to mirror their situation, which she avoids by tactful, exemplary retreat. Like her creator, she is content with compassion and the wisdom that accrues to those who observe life clearly and without resort to dubious generalizations. Bless them both.

--By Richard Schickel

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