The Soft Skin

A rather bland literary man embarks on an unlikely affair with a stewardess in François Truffaut’s oft-overlooked follow-up to Jules and Jim, made as Truffaut was simultaneously finishing his Alfred Hitchcock interview book—and demonstrating much of that master’s narrative elegance and suspense. Seemingly happily married with a child, but with his clock (literally) ticking, a middle-aged academic milquetoast begins juggling his Honoré de Balzac lectures with afternoon trysts with a stewardess (Françoise Dorléac). The blunt ending of “this astute dissection of middle-class mores” (BFI) and critique of the philandering class shocked the era’s critics, but—judging from the resigned smirk on one character’s face—it probably left others happy.