Francois Truffaut's wife died years ago, and he has since kept a shrine to her, a green room where he keeps her belongings, where he speaks to her. When he encounters Nathalie Baye, who seems to have a similar feeling about the dead, he can choose to be a man among the living, or build a chapel to the dead, to be completed with his own death.
Truffaut's adaptation of Henry James' "The Altar of the Dead" is a sere, underplayed movie about people who have given up on life in the aftermath of the First World War, and seek am excuse in the idealization of the dead. It's madness, but an attractively passive form of madness. Unfortunately, Truffaut, as great a director as he was, was not the actor to bring off this role.
I, too, have reached a stage in life when I know more dead people than living ones. I don't talk to them; they never shut up long enough to let me get in a word edgewise. But even these ghosts know that life is for the living.
6.9Keywords: francedying and deathworld war i
Plot summary
It's a decade after the conclusion of WWI in a French provincial town. A largely private and secretive man, Julien Davenne is surrounded by death in his life, whether it be the thoughts of his fallen comrades in the war while he came out without a scratch, or the virtuosity with which he writes about the dead in his job as a journalist at the Globe newspaper. But arguably the biggest effect of death in his life is the passing of his wife Julie Davenne shortly after they got married after the war. To preserve not so much her memory but her place in his life, he has created a shrine to Julie in a room in the house he shares with Mme. Rambaud, his housekeeper, and her young deaf charge, Georges. The place of not only Julie but others that have meant something to him in combination with the betrayal he has felt by the living, most specifically his childhood best friend, public figure Paul Massigny, has led to Julien having a greater affinity to the dead than to the living, those passed who have meant something to him who he believes he cannot replace not only in them as people but their specific place in his life. As such, he will never remarry. Out of circumstance, he embarks on creating a space for all those that have passed that have meant something to him, that space including a lit candle for each and every one never to be extinguished to represent they still being alive to him. He believes he has found a like-minded soul in reconnecting with Cecilia Mandel, the daughter of a long deceased acquaintance, she who he hopes will maintain this shrine with him. The singularity in his focus against anything outside this very narrow view may tear him and Cecilia apart despite what they mean to each other in life.
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Movie Reviews
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
François Truffaut,Maurice Jaubert,Nathalie Baye,Jean Dasté,Antoine Vitez
The Green Room is one of the most fascinating films; immensely deep. Sharp, (relatively) short,compact, mournful,doleful and intensely poetical, acutely moving ,and grim.François Truffaut put this film in the most inner core of his creative work; he keenly understood the extravagant and bizarre, uncanny side and nature of his subject--like the breath of the tomb.
Several supporting roles are striking (e.g.,the white friar that receives Davenne;the gazette's chief; i.e., Antoine Vitez and Jean Dasté),but the movie has, on the performances' plan, two poles:the fresh ,delicious Nathalie Baye, and François Truffaut, whose physiognomy is worth a treatise.
Where,and when,the exterior adventure stops,the inner,interior one begins--ever-so shocking.So,The Green Room is really like a "giallo" without the exterior/ extrinsic /phony excitement. On the other hand, Davenne's drama means nothing, because he is insane, mad; but Cecilia Mandel's way and suffering and light are meaningful, the true core of the movie.
Like Two English Girls and the Continent,The Green Room is a period movie, very calligraphic, and it delights in a certain taste for the colors and their relations; and then, the indelible freedom. The music is wonderful (it is Maurice Jaubert's).
Truffaut himself practiced such a cult as is seen in his film;in his many movies, some of the men he admired are honored.
The morbid, weird atmosphere is maintained with science,tact and instinct.
I consider him (François Truffaut) one of the ten most important directors (with Alfred Hitchcock,Renoir, Welles, Federico Fellini ,Michelangelo Antonioni ,Visconti,Andrei Tarkovsky ,Nikita Mikhalkov and Luis Buñuel ).One cannot cheat himself;Truffaut's work is as compact as theirs.
François Truffaut's movies are amazingly realistic--in a subtler, metaphysical sense--as being truly united closely to an inner realm that he made visible in his best films--hence, their visionary look.
In The Green Room one can admire again François Truffaut's tact and precision, intelligence and depth.As a man,as a reader,as a director, he was like no other;he managed to transfer/ transform his culture and his highly cultivated creativity into autonomous, coherent and labyrinthine films.The Green Room is one of those.he was a craftsman as well--an often inspired one;his effort was strikingly fruitful and original, independent and exciting and wholly humane.
Néstor Almendros's cinematography is enchanting.
It is a film elliptic, mysterious, without transitions, chilly, deliberately disturbing.
Morbid, Melancholic and Dark
Eleven years after the end of World War I, in a small village in the East of France, the journalist Julien Davenne (François Truffaut) still grieves the death of his beloved wife Julie ten years ago. He worships Julie in a green room in his house decorated with her pictures and belongings. When he meets auctioneer's assistant Cecilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye) in an auction house, they see that they have in common the obsession for death and become close to each other. When a fire destroys his green room, Julien convinces the bishop to restore the local chapel and prepare it as a sanctuary for Julie and his dead friends to preserve their memories, while Cecilia falls in love for him, but Julien is dead inside.
"La Chambre Verte" is the darkest of the Truffault's movies that I have seen. The melancholic romance has a beautiful cinematography; has great performances with Truffault in the role of Julien Davenne, a man that writes obituaries in the dying newspaper Le Globe and most of his friends have already died, and the gorgeous Nathalie Baye as an old acquaintance that falls in love for him. But the story is extremely unpleasant and somber and I did not like it. My vote is six.
Title (Brazil): "O Quarto Verde" ("The Green Room")