The Soft Skin — Accidents, Desire, and the Illusion of Control

François Truffaut's The Soft Skin may look like a quiet drama about infidelity, but beneath its surface beats a thriller's pulse. Its tone and rhythm recall Hitchcock — not through imitation, but through mood: the tension of secrecy, the precision of space, the constant hum of anxiety and guilt. Truffaut, of course, was steeped in Hitchcock's influence; his celebrated book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut would be published in 1966, though the conversations were already taking place around the time The Soft Skin was being made in 1962–63. You can feel that influence here — not in plot mechanics, but in the air itself.

Unlike his earlier, more radical or playful works (The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player), The Soft Skin marks a turn toward classical storytelling. It's an emotional film about adultery, bourgeois comfort, and private collapse — a chamber piece rather than a manifesto. The story of a middle-aged literary scholar who falls for a young flight attendant may sound formulaic, even familiar, yet Truffaut transforms it into something more claustrophobic, and strangely tragic.

Throughout the film, characters move through confined spaces: cars, airplanes, elevators, narrow hallways, small hotel rooms. The modern world becomes a system of boxes — elegant, efficient, and airless. Every encounter is mediated by doors, glass, and schedules. The only scene that breathes open air comes near the end, when the lovers separate on the balcony of an empty apartment. The sense of openness there feels almost shocking — a fleeting taste of freedom mixed with loss and failure. It's the calm before the final catastrophe.

The ending itself is heightened, almost melodramatic, and lacks the gentle ambiguity of Truffaut's earlier conclusions. Yet its exaggeration serves a point: bourgeois life, so carefully constructed, can only collapse in excess — in spectacle. The film's quiet buildup of accidents and coincidences suddenly erupts into violence, as if destiny has been waiting all along for a chance to speak.

This idea of chance — or rather, of bad chance — runs through all of Truffaut's early work. His films are haunted by the question of control: are we shaping our lives, or are we merely carried along by luck and circumstance? In The Soft Skin, the hero rushes to catch his flight in the opening scene. Truffaut films it with breathless suspense; we root for him to make it. He does — and only later do we realize that if he'd missed that plane, he would have lived. What looked like fortune was in fact pure misfortune. The same pattern repeats: a misplaced ticket, a photograph printed by chance — small accidents that snowball toward disaster.

Truffaut had already explored this fatal rhythm. In The 400 Blows, the entire plot begins with a stroke of bad luck: the teacher turns his head at the wrong moment and spots Antoine with a pin-up photo. Every boy in the class was doing the same thing, but only Antoine is caught. That moment sets off a chain of punishment and misunderstanding that defines his life. What begins as coincidence hardens into fate. Similarly, in Shoot the Piano Player, stray bullets and wrong turns derail the hero's fragile search for peace. Each attempt at freedom leads back into the same loop — as if the universe is quietly rigged.

Across these films, Truffaut keeps circling the same question: Do we choose our path, or are we simply moving through a world where luck — good or bad — decides for us?

In The Soft Skin, the answer feels especially cruel. The characters mistake control for love, routine for meaning, and choice for freedom. But the film's title itself gives the truth away: everything we think is solid — marriage, loyalty, identity — is as thin, as fragile, as soft as skin.