Metrograph

One of Truffaut’s most personal and beautiful films, photographed “in fecund greens and withering yellows” [Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader] by DP Néstor Almendros, and one of the least known of Truffaut’s major works—audiences, it seems, weren’t ready for this stark rumination on death from a filmmaker known for his gentle humor and twinkling personability. Truffaut, not far removed from his own premature end, stars himself alongside Nathalie Baye in this adaptation of Henry James’s short story “Altar of the Dead,” about a newspaper obituary writer who has become obsessed with the memory of friends departed from this mortal coil, represented here by images of the director’s own deceased loved ones.

Distributor: The Film Desk