The Woman Next Door movie storyline. Bernard lives happily with his wife Arlette and young son Thomas in a village outside Grenoble. One day a married couple, Philippe and Mathilde, move into the house next door. Bernard and Mathilde are shocked at meeting each other because years before, when both single, they had a stormy affair which ended painfully.
At first Bernard avoids Mathilde, until a chance meeting in a supermarket reawakens long-buried passions and soon, while openly good neighbours, in secret they pursue an affair. Though both find the strain of living their normal family and working lives unbearable, it is Bernard who cracks first. After publicly revealing his violent passion for Mathilde at a garden party, he keeps away from her and the two households try to get on with their lives.
But the rejected Mathilde then cracks and, after publicly collapsing at the tennis club, is hospitalised with depression. When she is released, she finds that to get far away from Bernard her husband has moved them out of the village. One night Bernard is woken by a banging shutter on the empty house next door and gets up to investigate. In the house, he spots Mathilde in the darkness. After they have made love on the bare floor, taking a gun out of her handbag she shoots first him and then herself.
The Woman Next Door (French: La Femme d’à côté) is a 1981 French film directed by François Truffaut. Reminiscent of the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult but set among young middle-class people in a provincial city, it tells the story of a fatal romance between a loving husband (Gérard Depardieu) and the attractive woman (Fanny Ardant) who moves in next door. The last of Truffaut’s serious films, being followed by the more light-hearted Vivement dimanche!, it was the 39th highest-grossing film of the year, with a total of 1,087,600 admissions in France.
The Woman Next Door (1981)
Directed by: François Truffaut
Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Henri Garcin, Michèle Baumgartner, Roger Van Hool, Véronique Silver, Philippe Morier-Genoud, Nicole Vauthier, Muriel Combe, Olivier Becquaert
Screenplay by: Jean Aurel, Suzanne Schiffman, François Truffaut
Production Design by: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko
Cinematography by: William Lubtchansky
Film Editing by: Martine Barraqué
Costume Design by: Michèle Cerf
Makeup Department: Catherine Crassac, Thi-Loan Nguyen
Music by: Georges Delerue
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists Classics
Release Date: September 30, 1981
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