La chambre verte

If there is a strange film, it is this one. François Truffaut directs himself. He is a husband who idolizes his dead wife and ends up building her a mausoleum in an abandoned chapel in a cemetery. He is a columnist in charge of the obituary column of a provincial newspaper. He will meet a woman who understands him, she also has a death in her life.

The film is both fascinating for its subject, and totally original, because this subject is not often the subject of a "mainstream" fiction; which is quite relative considering this very subject. And it was probably not easy to finance a film on such a subject. The basic materials are the writings of Henry James. The screenplay was written by François Truffaut himself and Jean Guault, a regular collaborator of François Truffaut.

The interpretation by François Truffaut himself of this character, accentuates its strangeness and originality: the jerky elocution of Truffaut, his inexpressive face permanently, gives depth to the character, and makes it all the more moving and unfathomable.

The work of the sets, interior and exterior, with a small provincial town at night, but also an impressive cemetery, which is overgrown with vegetation, almost abandoned, but which produces an astonishing climate.

The film manages to talk about the subject of the dead, while remaining in realism, or rather without tipping over into the fantastic, which could quickly appear, but it is not the case.