Transcript  from the documentary François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits (1993)

Interview with Fanny Ardant where she talks about François Truffaut, The Woman Next Door and Confidentially Yours...

The Woman Next Door

FANNY ARDANT: I remember François arguing that romanticism and deep passion weren't only to be found in 19th-century novels. Even in a parking garage or a supermarket, the power of feelings, sorrow or pain can make you faint. Somebody saying your name, or the effect of a touch... It's not just heroines in tight corsets, or social prohibitions or religious taboos.

I love the way there's no system to it, no logic, nothing's predictable, but at the same time, nothing's new. Madame de Lafayette's Princess of Cleves swoons, so does "Mathilde" (in The Woman Next Door). There's no poetic ambiance, no romantic garden, just a parking garage and a car. That's what is so strong about it. It reconciles everything: literature, our preconceptions about modern lovers and modern women. We think that modern women are liberated from certain feelings that stifled their lives, but there, in complete freedom and simplicity, we see it strike like a bolt from the blue. From then on, in the film, one of them keeps falling. Now it's Bernard, now Mathilde...it's like a seesaw. One goes down, the other gets up. It's a wonderful scene.

I think he (Truffaut) put more of himself into the "Mathilde" part although she's a woman. It's not the only film in which he was closer to the female role. But now I think about it, it's not so straightforward. This thing about a couple who can't live with or without each other, it's like François himself. He's both him and her, part Bernard, part Mathilde. The light and the dark side. Sometimes it's Bernard, sometimes Mathilde. But still, to me, with my taste for exaggeration and duplicity, I like to think that François was Mathilde.

Confidentially Yours

FANNY ARDANT: Do you remember that line in The Woman Next Door where she says, "They tell me to turn the page but it weighs a ton" and the doctor replies, "Life has more imagination than you do". It's true. It can be hard to believe, but there, in Confidentially Yours... Life -- by changing her bus stop -- life gives her the starter's horn and the horse race. Life does hold out chances. It beats anything you can put on paper for working out what you don't understand. I believe that outside the world of film and fiction, outside Confidentially Yours, which was a kind of joke -- although it's meticulously written and filmed, it's still a rather lightweight, off-the-cuff movie, there are scenes... I always feel there are two kinds of film: those that make you want to live, even if they're dark, and those that don't. In that scene, for instance, anybody can look over a wall, see a horse race, a bus drives up, etc... but it makes you feel as if you're floating on air. It works. You think, "I have one life. It's worth nothing...but I wouldn't trade it for the world."

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