Period dramas. My least favorite genre. But this one seduced me with its raw psychological embrace. So many barriers to physical expression, so many emotions and shifting alliances, like getting hugged and comforted one moment, then repressed and tormented the next. This was written by someone who knows how terribly complicated men and women are when placed on a sexualized chessboard. Truffaut really loves these kinky love triangles, doesn't he? He was depressed af when he made it, had just broken up with ice queen Catherine Deneuve, and it all just sorta poured outta him like an intimate journal we're not supposed to read. Similar JULES AND JIM (1962) vibes in terms of its threesome energy, only less whimsy and way more funeral and brooding. It's also the inverse of J&J, where a man, not a woman, gets tangled within a web of estrogen that pushes him away and draws him inside a sticky network of ever-shifting love-gasms. 

We're in the early part of the 20th century, the landscapes are pastoral and beautiful, and the mood feels taken directly from an impressionist painting. Everything feels like we're being told a fable, something that happened long ago. Two women are in love with a man, at different times, playing passionate ping pong in the wake of love's unpredictable, uncontrollable soul. Truffaut's storytelling is so simple and discreet, but his characters are so immensely complex and mired in paralysis. They play "silly games" with each other to mask the sexual frustrations they share, and while these non-platonic feelings grow they're also deflected in ways that bring about their misery. It's the law of attraction meets the law of resentment. The marriage between love and loss, hope and despair. I felt the pores of each character.

The film covers 20 years in 2 hours and by the end you not only intimately know them, you feel as though you've lived a lifetime with them.

 I love stories like this.

Truffaut Ranked