Customer Reviews

The Woman Next Door

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ardant and Depardieu look younger in this film, although age has not hurt Fanny Ardant, has made her even more beautiful (see 8 Femmes). This movie is about 20 years old so this was France at the time of Truffaut. This was the first movie of Fanny Ardant directed by Francois Truffaut. She is beautiful in this movie, in fact Truffaut eventually married her and they had a daughter.

Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant are former lovers who are reunited unintentionally after several years, as neighbors in a small village (think small  none of Paris - with proverbial French dogs, yes, the canine variety, one is inside a restaurant with diners!) They are married to different people who both seem very nice, one would think the past is behind the two former lovers, but this is a Truffaut movie, it cannot be mundane or even predictable nor be a soap opera. While the movie will not push you on the edge of your seat, Truffaut is a master in exploiting the senses and emotions. The interactions of the former lovers gives you a glimpse of the nature of their past relationship. It was not an ordinary affair. Ardant and Depardieu rekindle their affair and the emotional roller coaster starts. There are deep psychological scars that now create new wounds with the rekindling of the relationship. The movie is sensuous, funny, lighthearted, disturbing then dark and sad. The end is very surprising.

The DVD features trailers from Truffaut's other films including 400 Blows and the Wild Child.

This is a film which epitomizes not only Francois Truffaut's recurrent themes - obsessive love, an ordinary man's cognizant self-destruction - but also his style of understatement, which, as a personal favorite of mine, is closer to the experience of real life than that of any other filmmaker. When one witnesses a supreme disaster, what does one notice? Not the kind of coverage of events such as many "hot" American directors today think is powerful - dozens of shots that show the same action over and over again in closeup, medium shot, full shot, tracking shot, crane shot, computer FX shot, you-name-it shot; but instead from the point of view of ONE person who is intimately involved - who may miss half of the action, yet agonizingly fills in what he missed with what he imagines. This is the genius of Truffaut, who represents this admirable Gallic trait perhaps as much as any other French artist of the twentieth century. The acting of the principals Ardant and Depardieu is perfection, and the story is one of relentless emotional buildup, leading to a shattering denoument.

Truffaut really looked outstanding with this somber psychological study of the human soul, its affections and reminiscences around the intend of reviving a past passionate love affair, when the casualty face them again. She is his neighbor but he is happily married, though she really does not care about it, because she is living her actual passion as if the time would have suspended. In this state of things this fact is not any obstacle to her.

A true gem of the French Cinema that has proved countless opportunities how handle with this issue. Depardieu and Ardant are both perfect: the final scene is simply unforgettable.

A true icon picture.

Francois Truffaut was the real life lover of Fanny Ardant, right up to his premature death of a brain tumor. It is thus interesting that he used Ardant as the female half of this romantic and sexual obsession tale. The tale itself is simple. Depardieu and Ardant were once lovers. They married other people and while married to them, moved next door to one another inadvertently. They try and be suave and amiable about this, even having dinner at one another's houses. However, the spark ignites anew and the two rapidly become obsessed with one another both romantically and sexually. It is so bad that at one point she enters into a mental asylum as a result. Even that can't end their obsession though. There are people who cannot leave one another even though they are destroying one another. This film gets that down detail by detail, scene by scene. I've watched it many times and always am immediately pulled under its spell.

"Woman" pairs Ardant with the ever-charismatic Depardieu in this tangled tale of love. Truffaut makes an oddly familiar premise fresh via his own intelligent, insightful script and top-notch turns from his well-paired stars, who really give off sparks here. Henri Garcin and Michele Baumgartner also lend restrained but effective support as the couple's victimized spouses. Intense and heart-rending, "The Woman Next Door" is definitely worth a visit.

Ardant is irrestible and mesmerizing and Depardieu with that wit and charm. The merging of two enormous talents, one complementing the other and vice versa, is a rare instance that one can only express gratitude to the genius Truffaut for creating such film.

Depardieu and Ardant are paired in this movie, and not for the last time, and produce a grotesque story of obsession between former and now reunited lovers. Ardant's character is married, and her older, boring husband is beginning to suspect that she has feelings for another man.

If you conclude from this movie that the French are so much in love with being in love that they are not outraged even when love kills, I won't argue with you. "The Woman Next Door" is about forbidden love and fatal attraction. It is a movie about two people who are lost in the world without love, but who cannot love in this world.

If the movie was not directed by Francois Truffaut, who would say it's a masterpiece? To me, this movie is far less attractive than Jules et Jim and 400 Blows. The movie centres on a love affair between a married husband (Gerard Depardieu) and a married wife (Fanny Ardant) who happened to be lovers in the past. One day, they became neighbours and the sparkle of love was reignited. Truffaut liked to play with relationships in his movies. He posed the question "Who is your true love?" and "How if you react if your heart betrays you?" onto the chracters, and we can see the bewilderment in the first half of the movie. However, the movie starts to collapse when Adrant was put into a mental institution as no signs of her madness was mentioned or even noticed in the movie. And the later tragedy was already predicted when a dog was smelling a bag in a restaurant when the couple met the tennis club owner. The signs of suspense were unnaturally put to hint the audience. The death in the end falls in the cliche of ending a dead knot of love. To compare this movie, I would say Wong Kar-wai's In the mood of Love is on a much higher level on dealing with love affairs.