Silken Skin (La Peau Douce) – review

François Truffaut's 1964 drama of amour fou , now rereleased as part of a Truffaut season at London's BFI Southbank, is conducted with suavity and flair; it progressively discloses a satisfyingly subtle and textured love story with depth. Jean Desailly plays Pierre Lachenay, a married middle-aged publisher and literary celebrity. In Lisbon to lecture on Balzac, he has a passionate fling with Nicole, the air-hostess on his flight who is staying at the same hotel; she is played by the beautiful Françoise Dorléac, elder sister of Catherine Deneuve. (Dorléac was to die in a car accident three years after this movie was made.) Sexually infatuated with Nicole's exquisite youth, Pierre begins a furtive affair in which he is tormented by the social agonies, embarrassments and humiliations of contriving weekends away when they can be together. Sensuality turns into farce. (Is it accident, or some titular play on words, that makes Truffaut allow us to glimpse a poster for Marcel Ophüls's 1963 comedy Peau de Banane at the very nadir of their relationship?) At first brittle and merely elegant, the affair becomes compellingly tender; the vulnerability of both rises slowly to the movie's surface, together with that of Pierre's passionate wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti). The film can be melodramatic, though it is dispatched with deliberation and passion.