The Soft Skin (1969)

Truffaut's The Soft Skin opens with a sense of grand urgency, as well-known literary critic Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) is sped off to Orly Airport, frantically hoping to catch a flight from Paris to Lisbon. The sequence plays like a thriller, with Lachenay a man on the run. He's headed to Lisbon, however, simply to give a lecture on Balzac and Money because, as he puts it, he likes Balzac and doesn't dislike money. This opening sequence introduces crime-thriller touches Truffaut adopts throughout the film, winking slyly at the viewer, and highlighting and lampooning Lachenay's staid, bourgeois comfort and cluelessness. Lachenay is a conventional bore, not a man of action. On the flight, Lachenay becomes quickly infatuated with a stewardess, Nicole (Françoise Dorleac), with whom he begins an affair. Nicole is not of Lachenay's world, and Lachenay goes to outlandish, tragi-comic lengths to conceal all knowledge of her, hoping to craft for himself the best of two worlds. The two women in Lachenay's life, Nicole and his wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti) -- both compelling -- become the film's driving forces as they tear away at the wall Lachenay's haplessly half-erected between them. Ultimately, Franca plots her escape from Lachenay in a series of swift, sometimes shocking, and often funny events that shouldn't be spoiled here. Without giving them away, these events yield a truly memorable ending to a superb film, with Truffaut surprisingly foreshadowing elements of Quentin Tarantino's bag of tricks nearly three decades before Tarantino's first feature.