A married man finds out that his ex-lover and her husband have moved into a neighbouring house in Truffaut’s penultimate feature about the inevitability of extramarital affairs—it covers familiar thematic ground but the director’s sure-handed grip on the narrative gives it illicit thrills.  

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Made before his final feature, Confidentially Yours (1983), The Woman Next Door was, for some detractors, a genre exercise that didn’t quite add any value to Francois Truffaut’s illustrious filmography, one that was cut short by his early death. 

While it isn’t commonly regarded as an essential work, I found myself compelled by its narrative of inevitability, as the French auteur’s sure-handed grip on how the story would develop and culminate allowed me to simply enjoy the illicit thrills that it promised. 

The Woman Next Door isn’t an erotic, sensationalistic work that perhaps other filmmakers would have been tempted to produce with the same script.  Well, think of how this film would have felt under the hands of, say, Paul Verhoeven. 

Instead, Truffaut drills down to the enticing relationship between Bernard and Mathilde, played by Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant, who impose themselves on the screen with charismatic presence. 

Bernard, a married man, becomes distressed when he finds out that the neighbours who moved into a vacant adjacent house are Mathilde, his ex-lover, and her husband. 

“Love affairs must have a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Their kids play with each other, but those two adults with a checkered history play their disingenuous games whenever their spouses aren’t around.  Extramarital affairs are more common than we think, but it is the moral question that is most often asked—is it right? 

Truffaut doesn’t really care and puts the responsibility of response not with society’s ‘codes of conduct’, but with the lovers themselves. 

As such, watching The Woman Next Door feels liberating inasmuch as there is little explicit sense of the traditional guilt that follows such rendezvouses, which could partly explain why the film remains thrilling even when Truffaut resists, though not entirely, psychological thriller conventions. 

At the same time, the picture allows viewers to recognise that affairs don’t arise artificially; neither do they end naturally.

Grade: B+

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