Rating: - All You Need is
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.
Rating: - One of Truffaut's Finest
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.
- All You Need is