La femme d’à côté [The Woman Next Door] (1981)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) While writer-director François Truffaut’s penultimate film La femme d’à côté is not usually recognized as a major film in his filmography, it still shows the clean-cut love of cinema that characterized his entire career. Here we have a romantic drama delivered with a mixture of forthrightness and just enough style to keep it interesting. The plot gets going once a happily married man with a wife and kid finds his life suddenly complicated by the reappearance of an old flame right next door. Trying to feign disinterest to his wife doesn’t slow down the inevitable rekindling of his previous affair, and with it all of the unresolved issues that existed between them years earlier. It doesn’t end well, although one hopes that the surviving characters may end up happier without those messy unstable protagonists in their lives. For French cinema fans, the casting here is intriguing—with notable then-ascendant-superstars Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant in the lead roles. A bit of narration (from a much older character with far more perspective) highlights the essentially adolescent nature of the high-drama romance. While not great cinema, La femme d’à côté is watchable enough—and a reminder that Truffaut operating far under his peak could still turn out a film worth the trouble.