"Neither with you nor without you."

François Truffaut's films are often filled with frustrated lovers. They examine differences between infatuation and love, and they are almost always very personal and autobiographical, so it should come as no surprise that his tragic The Woman Next Door ( La Femme d'à côté) was inspired by a real amorous relationship. In this case Catherine Deneuve serves as Truffaut's muse, as he scripts the story of two former lovers accidentally brought together after an eight-year absence in an impossible situation. Now happily married to someone else, passionate obsession leads inevitably to disaster--much like unresolved feelings could have erupted in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, had the former lovers not matured.

Collaborating with screenwriters Jean Aurel and Suzanne Schiffman once again (Love on the Run, among other films), Truffaut insisted that the drama needed a nervous breakdown and must lead to death while the two are making love. From the first synopsis, the team took just three months to finish the script with Aurel creating the overall structure and Schiffman concentrating on developing Madame Jouve's (Véronique Silver) character--the tennis club manager, who is haunted by a parallel former past love affair and who serves as a confidante for both lovers.

As with nearly all Truffaut's male characters, the lead character (Gérard Depardieu as Bernard Coudray) remains an adolescent trapped in an adult body. Not only does he have difficulty controlling his hormones, but his job as a model boat navigator conjures up the same refusal to grow up imagery that plagues Antoine Doniel in Bed and Board. The impractical job parallels Bernard's existence, however, as his emotional instability and romanticism doom him to make illogical choices.

Casting Fanny Ardant as Depardieu's lover was stimulated after the1981 Cesar awards when Ardant joined Truffaut's traditional post-ceremonial supper at Fouquet's with The Last Metro cast. Seeing her with Depardieu convinced him that they would be ideal as the frustrated lovers for his upcoming project, even though she had only appeared in television drama at the time. Truffaut states that he had been "seduced by her large mouth, her deep voice and its unusual intonations, her big black eyes and her triangular face." Needless to say, Ardant would become another of Truffaut's love interests in real life, and would go on to star in his final film, Confidentally Yours. Her reserve and energy balance well with Depardieu's powerful acting, notably during a couple of scenes where he goes berserk.

Truffaut's camera technique is always notable. Signature tracking shots and location shooting in the village of Grenoble mark this film, and he even begins with a humorous lesson in cinematography that also hints that everything we'll see is filtered by point of view shots. A close shot of narrator Madame Jouve placed against the background of the Corenc Tennis Club gives the impression that she is an expert player, but she pointedly instructs the cameraman to move back to show how this is illusion, and the tracking shot reveals her leg brace and walking cane. It turns out that these devises play a larger significance than a simple camera technique illustration, but the initial contact demonstrates Truffaut's mature playfulness with the film medium. Remarkably, this opening sequence is the last shot for the film, as it was added on when Truffaut wasn't satisfied with the structure of the first cut.

The Woman Next Door opened to generally positive reviews in 1981, and it holds up remarkably well today although the ending now seems unnecessary and cliché after numerous other films have adopted similar finales over the past twenty years. A simple story, it retains dramatic tension as details are gradually revealed and Truffaut mines the natural acting prowess of his leading lovers to great effect. Although he put great energy into structuring a workable plot, the real gifts of the film lie in its strong character development and memorable emotional connections that Ardant and Depardieu create.