CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Claudio Carvalho In Grenoble, Bernard Coudray (Gérard Depardieu) and his wife Arlette Coudray (Michèle Baumgartner) are happily married with their son Thomas. When the next door house is rented to the flight controller Philippe Bauchard (Henri Garcin) and his wife Mathilde Bauchard (Fanny Ardant), Arlette invites the couple for a dinner party but Bernard avoids Mathilde. When they meet each other in the supermarket, they recall their love affair that traumatically ended eight years ago. However their love rekindles and they meet each other in a hotel room. But once together again, they have a stormy affair that ends again with tragic consequences."La femme d'à côté", a.k.a. "The Woman Next Door", is a tragic and powerful romance by François Truffaut with the love story of a stormy couple reunited again after eight years by chance but that cannot be together. The performances are magnificent and the conclusion is predictable. The final quote of the narrator Madame Odile Jouve for their epitaph is perfect ("Neither with you, nor without you."). My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Mulher do Lado" ("The Woman Next Door")

thor5894 I really wanted to like this one more, it's the kind of domestic drama the French usually do well, but it just didn't work for me. Truffaut takes material grounded in realism and tries to impose a fable-like atmosphere, and ends up in an awkward middle ground. Just one example, he has Fanny Ardant faint at least twice in the movie. Really? Is this 1981 or 1921? I really didn't take to Ardant's performance, though I suspect the script shares the blame for that; she comes off less as a real person than a male construct.The story--Ardant and her husband move next door to Gerard Depardieu and his wife, the two having had an intense affair a decade earlier--is well told and holds interest, but the details are often unconvincing and there's an off-putting tone to the whole affair. For instance, Ardant and Depardieu act frantic about their secret right from the start--but why? Both were single when they were previously a couple, so there would be no scandal in being honest with their spouses, yet both insist on saying nothing. Later in the film, when the truth is exposed, and by this time the two have become adulterous lovers in the present, the respective spouses are maddeningly reasonable about the whole thing. Yeah yeah, they're French, but really, if betrayed spouses always reacted this mildly, people wouldn't feel the need to hide adultery in the first place.This vague inauthentic vibe persists right to the melodramatic ending, which also comes off as oddly emotionally flat.

paul2001sw-1 A young, almost boyish Gerard Depardieu stars in 'The Woman Next Door', one of Francois Truffaut's later films. In some ways, it's a stereotypically French affair, a stylish and urbane story of passionate love. But the film itself, though nicely observed, fails to really catch fire. One reason may be the fact that their isn't much in the way of character development, not because the characters are one-dimensional but because they are fully described in the premise, and change little thereafter. We are told that the central figures are in love, but know they could not live together, and what follows is merely the logical exposition of this. Another is that they themselves seem the biggest obstacles to their own happiness. Therefore, though the film is watchable throughout, as a whole it amounts to little more than a collection of its parts, rather than a great and profound tragedy. Other work by this director packed a greater punch.

Filmnate Very good movie with excellent performances from Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant. The emotions and performances are outstanding. If you have ever felt a strong love that borders on the irrational, then you may identify with this film. There are some small flaws of coincidences in the story. I found the last 20 minutes quite disturbing, and wish the writers found a different one. It seems to imply that real love must have a tragic ending. It is sort of an 19th Century "romantic" ending. Perhaps, that's what they were shooting for in the modern cotext of France in the 1980's. But nonetheless one of Truffaut's better films. What do you think?