Synopsis
A WWI veteran decides to build a memorial to all of the people who have mattered to him but are now dead.
1978 ‘La Chambre verte’ Directed by François Truffaut
A WWI veteran decides to build a memorial to all of the people who have mattered to him but are now dead.
François Truffaut Nathalie Baye Jean Dasté Patrick Maléon Jeanne Lobre Antoine Vitez Jean-Pierre Moulin Serge Rousseau Jean-Pierre Ducos Annie Miller Nathan Miller Marie-Jaoul de Poncheville Monique Dury Laurence Ragon Marcel Berbert Thi-Loan Nguyen Christian Lentretien Néstor Almendros Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko
O Quarto Verde, Das grüne Zimmer, La habitación verde, Vihreä huone, La camera verde, 녹색 방, Зеленая комната, Det gröna rummet, 绿屋
“La Chambre verte” is a memorial to the dead that could only be crafted by a someone acutely aware of inheriting from the deceased the arduous task of living.
François Truffaut, poet of the everlasting adolescence, reckons with the opposite side of age’s spectrum in “La Chambre.” The film was almost a decade in production; years, which saw the passing of several of Truffaut’s closest mentors. The plot pulls from this same sorrow, depicting a First World War veteran, who becomes an obituary writer, obsessed with, and living only for, the dead.
Truffaut, playing the lead role of the writer, mirrors his own difficulties in those of the character. The veteran of “La Chambre” was no more than a boy…
Truffaut's strongest acting performance as a death-obsessed weirdo who commissions a RealDoll of his dead wife, only to chop it into bits.
Je dois avouer que j'ai été particulièrement sensible à ce petit film de fantômes sans fantômes où Truffaut tente, de manière pour moi très touchante, d'honorer ses morts. La question de la dette est importante pour Truffaut, lui qui a tout appris au contact de Bazin, de Cocteau, de Rossellini, d'Hitchcock, lui qui a littéralement été sauvé par l'art, pour qui l'art est toute la vie, et dont chaque film est en soit un hommage au cinéma et à sa capacité quasi surnaturelle à transcender la vie, si l'on veut. La Chambre verte, aussi petit et modeste soit-il, est donc pour moi une très belle lettre d'amour de Truffaut à tous ces gens et ces artistes importants pour lui, tous…
For a film in which someone tries so fiercely to keep the memory of a dead loved one as a living, organic entity, it surely feels like a bleak and despondent funeral march. Camera movements as ghostly glimpses of an universe devastated by grief, faint flickers of light discovering a world washed out by monochromatic inertia. The acting is subdued to discourse because words can keep us closer to things past in an easier way than gestures - they are fully committed to idealism, whereas matter can only be retrieved by small symptoms of hopeless denial and growing solitude. Tears on candles, memory is water and fire. Truffaut’s absolute masterpiece.
Truffaut really went "push me to the edge / all my friends are dead" mode on this one lol. much like his other 70s films it's a deeply obsessive work, as Truffaut himself plays a man who writes obituaries and builds a monument to all of the loved and admired ones in his life who have passed on. Hitchcock and Renoir would die within 2 years of its release, and it feels like the work of an artist who is reckoning with the fact that he'll no longer be able to interact with those who shaped his life and his work.
Truffaut in a deadly mission. Impressive single minded, perhaps too studied to quite be the great film it is intended. A reminder he was often at his best when he was at his most creepy.
FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT'S LA CHAMBRE VERTE
(Cahiers du Cinema 288, May 1978)
Pascal Bonitzer
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases the great,
as the wind extinguishes candles and lights fires.
La Rochefoucauld
Given that, for those who possess eyes to see and ears to hear (for cinema, of course, is also a matter of sound) La Chambre Verte is the most beautiful, most profound of Truffaut's films - and without pushing the point, one of the most beautiful French films of recent years - I will first consider Truffaut the actor.
And first of all, his voice. This voice is a symptom - a symptom of the laziness and stupidity of a good deal of film criticism in France. A laziness…
probably the most beautiful score in truffaut's whole filmography—this whole film has a very morose undercurrent (for obvious reasons) but that first scene in the green room where julien puts the ring on the mannequin hand and views the photos of his dead wife as the score plays made me cry. this is such a unique depiction the reverence paid by the living to their dead loved ones. it's not surprising to me that it's so intensely felt, considering that truffaut experienced the loss of so many people close to him throughout his life (when françoise dorléac died in 1967 he found it too painful to attend another funeral thereafter).
the one moment of real levity i felt while watching this film was when truffaut pointed to a photo in the shrine that was of a "dead german soldier" and it's just....a still of oskar werner in FAHRENHEIT 451?? qu’est-ce à dire que ceci trufo
Le film n'a pas très bonne réputation, mais je m'attendais à une sorte de grand film caché. C'est pas un grand film, mais c'est quand même plutôt touchant de voir Truffaut se peindre en homme incapable de vivre avec les vivants. Ça émeut son cinéphile.
Fahrenheit 451 feito por um cineasta.
E, talvez, o melhor filme sobre a cinefilia.
Truly one of the most exquisitely anguished works of art in existence. It makes me cry grace-filled tears. A profound howl of loss and absence that turns into a sublime memorial: Cinema, the medium of desperate resurrection. Truffaut understood this without being as hectoring, distant, smart, smarmy, dawdling, paranoid, or slick as any of his Cahiers colleagues. You don’t know what you love until it is forever lost; at that moment, it is permanently possessed. That people spat on such a humble masterpiece…a tiny metaphor for the barbarity of humanity, the ignorance in the face of nightmarish honesty. A man tries to account for each single dead intimate in his life, but can only adequately acknowledge their importance by building towards the one death that will make sense of it all: his own. So dark, yet so life-affirming.