By the time the legendary French director François Truffaut reached the 1980s, he had largely run out of steam. Self-indulgent personal films like The Man Who Loved Women (1977) seemed to alternate with tired genre exercises like Confidentially Yours (1983). The great exception, of course, was his incredible ode to European theater: The Last Metro (1980). But other than that film, Truffaut's output during the last few years of his career largely unimpressed me. However, I found myself enjoying his penultimate film entitled The Woman Next Door. The film follows Bernard Coudray and Mathilde Bauchard, two lovers who accidentally move next door to each other years after their affair ended. At first, they try to avoid each other. But it isn't long before their passions are re-ignited. However, Mathilde soon feels incredible remorse over cheating on her husband. She tries to break the affair off. However, Bernard's affection mutates into a dangerous obsession. One of the problems that I've always had with Truffaut's work was that his dramas concerning adults always seemed to be emotionally stale. When he turned his camera to children he managed to explore universes of emotion that other film-makers could only dream of. But The Woman Next Door contains all of the pathos and emotions that I've come to miss from Truffaut's work about adults. It isn't his greatest film, mind you. While the emotion is certainly there, I never got the sense that this was a film directed by one of the men who literally re-defined the cinema. But it is still a nice reprieve from a phase of his career that I found to be mired in mediocrity.
7/10
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