Truffaut and the Failure of Introjection

My reflections are on two films by François Truffaut: L'homme qui aimait les femmes (‘The Man Who Loved Women’, 1977) and La chambre verte (‘The Green Room’, 1978), produced within a year of each other. At a first viewing, they seem to be two very different works. La chambre verte, dramatic and painful, is based on a sombre short story by Henry James, ‘The Altar of the Dead’, and on two other of his works, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and ‘The Friends of Friends’. It is the story of Julian Davenne, a ‘virtuoso’ in necrology, and his passionate loving obsession for one woman alone—his wife who died young—even after her death and until his own death. The other film, L'homme qui aimait les femmes, is a delightfully ironic comedy of the autobiographical type, in which the protagonist continually falls in love with every woman he meets, and in which there is the hint of a delightful touch of foot and leg fetishism.

Both films, however, in spite of the great differences in language, style and narrative, basically tell the same story of the incapacity to love and to make one's own internal impulse coincide with the encounter with a real person. The protagonist of L'homme qui aimait les femmes does not know how to distinguish or to choose, in a giddy erotic round of seduction, unfaithfulness and disillusion in which the illusion is repeatedly rekindled. In La chambre verte, Julian is imprisoned in a repetitive trap of an opposite kind. Tenaciously faithful to the image of one woman alone, he cannot conceive of a love object unless it is eternally identical to itself. Whether in a state of immobility or in flight, both characters are living outside of real time, enslaved by an obsession.

In La chambre verte, Truffaut's outstanding intuition lies in showing us how the impossibility of completing the mourning process coincides with the impossibility of loving. The drama of Julian Davenne, a kind of ‘platonic’ necrophile, is not so much the sorrow of having lost his real wi