Soft Skin

Soft Skin



Pierre is in a hurry to the airport and almost misses his plane for Lisbon. If he had missed that flight, the events that follow would not have occurred: Truffaut's fourth feature film is study of the delicate balances, or Soft Skin, of life and the important role that circumstances might have in life. The title of the film, The Soft Skin is notable for the multiple images and meanings it suggests. The film's title can refer to Nicole's seductive, soft skin but It can also signify the unstable quality of life.
Pierre Lachenay is a harmless figure, almost a common man. Having achieved certain success in the literary field it seems that he has everything under control. Nicole, apart from her physical appeal, she offers, as a woman, Pierre an opposite angle on life, a non-intellectual and romantic one.
One must note that Truffaut uses this actor to allow us to see him as a common man, that could be anybody. Nicole, for her part, is attracted to Pierre's intellect see likes listening to him, hear him talk and quote, and through the conversation he brings out her own natural intelligence. She brings to him what he does not have and vise-versa.
Quickly Pierre's life self-destructs. He is fully aware of what he is doing and yet there is a clear ambivalence in the acting: he is aware that his wife knows that he is cheating but he still offers Nicole to call her the day after. He does not really want to give up his home life for Nicole and neither does his wife after the incident, yet it seems that the destructive affair cannot cease to continue, an affair that will lead to his own physical destruction.
The Reims sequence is particularly effective in showing that Nicole is not that important to Pierre, and she is even standing in his is business, derailing him from his nature of work by telling him to busy her stockings. The Reims scenes, the breaking up scenes with his wife, and many others, clearly show the film's view of men and women as fundamentally different. Men are intellectual, rational, and cannot express feelings. Women are governed by emotion, and in opposition to the abstract world of men. Franca, like Catherine from Jules and Jim, destroys Pierre, is an idealist she wants to have everything or nothing. The extensive filming of mechanical maneuvers or objects in this film such as at the gas station the camera focuses on the numbers on the pump, and the airplane’s dashboard, the sequences of driving shows the destructive, perhaps unstoppable, irrational power of the eros.
Nicole is beautiful, funny, gracious, and attentional but in the same time inaccessible, like Catherine. She is the ideal woman of Pierre, he treats he as so by photographing her, watching her, and touching her, and making her dress as he wants like in Vertigo. She is not a common mistress since one can note the difference of age, he will call her several times “ma petite fille”, my daughter. This ideal, these photographs will be Pierre’s death sentence, by another woman who also sees her life being destructed. Every character will hurt himself and hurt the person he loves in his turn.
Truffaut in this movie chooses to minimize the dialogues, the neutral tone of Pierre is most noted although the general tone of the movie keeps shifting with the emotions of the women, that can be in two opposites feelings and express them in the same time. Whereas Pierre cannot undo something that had been said “we cannot go backwards like this” says Pierre at the door steps, his face is, almost, always motionless. Yet the camera is very often fast moving, placing successive actions adding much to the nervousness of the plot. And so does the hesitating camera the gives very often Pierre’s point of view, such as the scene in the elevator going up, seeing Nicole leaving, and going down.