Movies:
The Woman Next Door
DVD Release
- Release Date: 1999
- Rating:
- Genre: Drama
- Movie Type: Romantic Drama, Melodrama
- Themes: Self-Destructive Romance, Crimes of Passion, Lovers Reunited
- Director: François Truffaut
- Main Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Henri Garcin, Michele Baumgartner, Véronique Silver
- Release Year: 1981
- Country: FR
- Run Time: 106 minutes
- MPAA Rating: R
Plot
François Truffaut's The Woman Next Door continues his fascination with obsessive love. It was also his first collaboration with Fanny Ardant, who would become his favored leading lady for the last phase of his career and offscreen love for the last years of his life. Bernard Coudray (Gerard Deparidieu) is a happily married man living in the village of Grenoble; his life is knocked askew when Philippe and Mathilde Bauchard move in next door, and Mathilde (Ardant) proves to be Bernard's long-ago lover. Truffaut and his screenwriters deftly allow the couple to slide into an affair, slowly revealing that their previous relationship ended without a firm resolution. Mathilde, married more recently than Bernard, to a devoted man some years older than her, senses the futility of revisiting the past, but her attempts to break off the relationship inflame Bernard. When Bernard begins to regret his own reckless behavior, Mathilde's understandable confusion leads to a nervous breakdown. Poorly received by critics who had written off Truffaut as irrelevant, The Woman Next Door is very much the work of the man who made Jules and Jim, Mississippi Mermaid, and Two English Girls. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie GuideReview
The Woman Next Door is a key film in the final phase of François Truffaut's career. His second film with Gerard Depardieu (a more muscular screen presence than Jean-Pierre Leaud) and the first of two Truffaut films with Fanny Ardant, The Woman Next Door has a story line right out of a soap opera. Fortunately, it plays like variations of a half-dozen other intelligent Truffaut films on the vagaries of love. Depardieu and Ardant evince such potent chemistry that it's hard not to root for their characters, Bernard and Mathilde, even as you see them slide toward tragedy. The key supporting character is neither of their spouses, but Madame Jouve (Veronique Silver), the crippled middle-aged woman who runs the local tennis club and owes her infirmity to a botched suicide over a long-ago love. Her backstory (and the possible revival of that affair) should inform Bernard and Mathilde, but they're too distracted (and haven't seen any Truffaut films about obsessive passion) to avoid plunging toward a bad end. Darker and more compact than his previous film The Last Metro, and more substantial than his follow-up and last film Confidentially Yours, The Woman Next Door may prove the summation of a great career tragically cut short by Truffaut's death in 1984. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie GuideCast
- Gérard Depardieu - Bernard Coudray
- Fanny Ardant - Mathilde Bauchard
- Henri Garcin - Philippe Bauchard
- Michele Baumgartner - Arlette Coudray
- Véronique Silver - Madame Jouve
Philippe Morier-Genoud - Doctor; Olivier Becquaert - Thomas Coudray; Roland Thénot - Estate agent; Roger Van Hool - Roland Duguet
