[La Peau Douce] is a trap: there have been plenty of films about adultery, but few have ventured to take the mechanism so methodically to pieces….

Through his use of disconnection (light switches, camera shutters, gear-changes), Truffaut demonstrates the fragility of love; his world is one of objects and skins, of fleeting glances and fleeting contacts, as though love, in the steely world in which we live, were no more than two skins touching in a universe where things and people are sealed away from each other in impenetrable envelopes.

There is still much of the old Truffaut in La Peau Douce in the quotations from Renoir, from himself, and the Tirez-style baroque couplets, but a new, mature Truffaut is revealed. To the qualities which we already know, his freshness, charm, delicacy and reserve, a new deliberation has been added….

The weaknesses are self-evident. There is a...