The Soft Skin 4K 1964 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Pierre Lanchet is rich and successful, he has a beautiful family - beautiful wife Franke and charming ten-year-old daughter Sabine. It would seem that what else is needed? But when Pierre meets the dazzling Nicole, he realizes that for the sake of love, even for the sake of such a sudden and possibly unpromising, he is ready to abandon his family....

Review 4K Movie

'I have found that the cause of all man's misfortunes is that he does not know how to stay quietly in a room.' Pascal

If at the beginning of a novel we notice a gun hanging on the wall, it is bound to go off at the end. When, at the beginning of The Soft Skin, the journalist asks the protagonist the question, 'Balzac and money?' Or maybe Balzac and love?”, it becomes obvious that it will be about love.

At the heart of the movie by Francois Truffaut the most that is anything but banal love triangle: the aging writer Pierre Lashne (Jean Desayi), his faithful wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti), a young frivolous mistress - flight attendant Nicole (Francoise Dorleak).

The movie in its time received a mixed assessment, reviews ranged from enthusiastic to derogatory, from white to black.

Black and white are the main and only colors of the film, but not because it was shot on black and white film, no. In this case, rather the choice of film was due to the overall directorial concept. Two of the most stylish colors. Two of the most ambiguous colors. Two completely opposite colors, inextricably linked to each other, like masculine and feminine.

The director meticulously selects the objects that fall into the frame: black hat, white phone, black hair, white underwear, black skirt, white doors.

This technique reaches its highest point when Nicole brings a black tray with black and white dishes out onto the porch; the door closes meaningfully, and a black and white kitten, a living sign of yin-yang, gently reaches for the cup of unfinished black coffee. A delicate, yet transparent metaphor. Let me remind you that the movie was allowed to be seen by people of any age: the banal “to make love” sounds twice or three times, and always from the lips of a young simple girl Nicole, emphasizing the irreplaceable difference between a beautiful stewardess and an aging intellectual.

The motif of black and white is continued in the presence or absence of light: a woman's hand lights the lamp, but immediately a man's hand rests on it, affectionately turning it off.

It is well known that black and white disciplines the image; artists often sketch the colorful denseness with black ink: then the flaws in the composition become obvious. Truffaut, “painting” his frame with two colors, takes a risk. And he takes risks consciously, which is evident from the careful staging of the frame, where every detail is weighed and balanced according to the laws of fine art: click on the freeze frame and exquisite still lifes, landscapes and portraits will freeze in front of you (especially remember the heads of Pierre and Frankie against the background of wallpaper in a large flower - just like Van Gogh's - and Klimt's “conversation” between the squares of pattern on Odile's dress and the squares of tile).

But in addition to composition and tonal arrangement, each frame of “The Soft Skin” also has an almost constructivist rhythm: white semicircles of tire tracks on the asphalt, longitudinal and transverse structures of buildings, stripes on the door panels in the restaurant and on the phone booth - all this makes our eye move along a certain route, as well as the dynamics of the film as a whole.

In “The Soft Skin” almost all processes, all actions, even the most banal ones, are shown in two directions: a plane arrives/flies; a truck goes one way/now it goes the other way; a worker inserts/removes a gasoline “gun”; turning the key starts/stops the car; the main character goes to/from the airport - just as the same characters are constantly meeting, and situations duplicate each other. The most striking example, which wraps the linear narrative of the picture into a ring, is the episode with the man trying to meet Franca on the street. We see an almost exact replica of Pierre's acquaintance with Nicole in the hotel elevator, as exact as the circumstances allow. The further development of the situation is strangely similar to the scene of a Reimsian philanderer molesting Nicole, which Pierre observes through the window.

The thematic threads stretching through the whole movie, popping up here and there, are woven into a pattern, the correctness of which points to a known calculation. Reflections are a good example of this. Mirrors (be it the rear-view mirror in the car, or the mirror on the dressing table, or the polished car, or the store window, or Franca's shout: “Have you ever looked in a mirror, even once?”) not only hint at a double life, at some second bottom inherent in all the characters, but also give the viewer an opportunity to see what is happening from several angles at once. The same motif of reflections is picked up by the posters with Pierre Lachnais's picture pasted on the streets and the fateful pictures in which Franca sees Nicole. The vague, boundless mirror surface takes on a menacingly sharp shape at the end, however, when Nicole looks into the knife. Tension builds, and the plane of the blade vectors the further direction of the plot.

But whose skin does the title refer to? Obviously, the skin of all three characters. Nicole's skin is soft because it is young, smooth, and generally innocent (“it felt like he was... dirty, and every time after we were together I took a shower,” she recalls one of her romances in a candid conversation with Pierre). Franca's skin is tender because it is fading and can no longer bear bruises and abrasions with the ease of a twenty-year-old girl (the words of the deceived lyrical heroine Sylvia Plath in the poem 'Fever 103' immediately come to mind: “My gold-beaten skin is infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive”). Pierre's skin is delicate because it cannot in any way take a definite form, inherent in the outlines of his body.

All this tenderness together leads to the tragic finale. The gun fires.