Critics reviews

The camera unfurls this narrative much more than any dialogue could begin to register. When Pierre writes a declaration of love to Nicole and then spots her, Truffaut cuts from her face to an insert of the note, then out to Paul's face, all before panning down to him crumpling up the note. With words, it would take minutes to describe what is registered by the camera in a matter of seconds.

Viewed as a genre experiment, The Soft Skin doesn't really work. Truffaut directs it like a thriller from start to finish—the opening sequence treats Pierre's concern about missing his flight to Lisbon as if he's a secret agent in danger of jeopardizing the country's security—yet the climactic threat of violence still feels like it arrives out of nowhere, reeking of artistic desperation... At the same time, Truffaut's natural penchant for lyricism keeps asserting itself in arresting ways.

Truffaut wagers that Pierre is interesting because the character's very dilemmas align closely with the director's own. After all, Truffaut's actual apartment doubles for Pierre's in the film. Nicole is framed as an object of beauty and desire for Pierre, and Truffaut legitimizes these desires by entertaining them as cinematic in the first place.

I know of nothing quite like The Soft Skin, in its tonal unpredictability. Characteristic is the illicit couple's nightmarish sojourn in Reims, which ranges from the darkly comic to the devastating, often within the same frame. Along with Coutard's expressive cinematography, Georges Delerue's lovely, nimble score serves to keep us from being able to settle into a single mood or emotion... For my money, it's one of the director's finest films, subtle, powerfully adult, and profoundly personal.

The dialogue is for the most part intentionally banal and Desailly's Lachenay is largely unsympathetic and childish, but over this "most everyday universe" Truffaut and cinematographer Raoul Coutard create a memorably oneiric visual record of the precipitous rise and fall of an affair.

An "antipoetic" (per Truffaut) response to the director's Jules and Jim, this extramarital tragedy in the key of thriller is no less stylish. Raoul Coutard's camera is still agile—panning, tracking, always on the move—but now it's neurotic, and Claudine Bouché and Truffaut's fast-cut editing expressly avoids lyricism.

Coming in the wake of The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim, François Truffaut's fourth feature, The Soft Skin, has never gotten much respect—even though many people (myself included) regard it as one of his best... The Soft Skin naturalizes New Wave technique; its tonal shifts and disjunctive montage are relatively subtle.

Distrust of entrenched institutions like religion, politics, and marriage are core themes of the French New Wave, and this emotional anxiety permeates throughout François Truffaut's The Soft Skin, a mesmerizing morality play detailing the machinations of adultery and their deadly consequences.

Like one of Eric Rohmer's ‘Moral Tales' recast as a smouldering thriller, the film is marked by an intense, unromantic rigour absent in the director's early work.

Losey would have wrung cruel, rousing comedy out of these situations, but Truffaut is too aware of everybody's feelings to not go for the heavy sigh of karmic melodrama. Still, the cross-cutting between the husband waiting outside the occupied phone booth and the wife striding toward the café armed like Annie Oakley shows a more trenchant understanding of Hitchcock than anything in The Bride Wore Black.

Truffaut's film is so splendidly alive with observed details, translating the inner workings of Pierre's fumbling psyche into visual terms... Françoise Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve's sister, is captivating as Nicole, exhibiting many of the qualities in her performance – sensuality, and a remarkable range of emotions – that were considered lacking in her sister.

La Peau douce is the most physical of [Truffaut's] passionate stories, the one that most delights in the body of the desired and, of course, forbidden woman.