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...They ask Julien to go through their file on the man and select the photograph to be run with the article...

...He is leaving so late because he became lost in contemplation before his wife's grave and has only now, hours later, come back to himself...

...It consumes...

...Julien's devotion to his wife's memory may give him a reason for living, but such rare feeling is unavoidably paradoxical, too...

...Although The Green Room is based on a Henry James story that has been transposed from the 19th century into the 1920s, it reminds me of a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Birthmark," about a scientist who attempts to remove a tiny, hand-shaped birthmark from the cheek of his otherwise peerless wife, and in the process kills her...

...Keeping her memory alive gives him a reason to live, he feels...

...Truffaut wanted Julien to live in a kind of twilight realm, and Almendros achieved this for him...

...Human emotion, the sort that's life-giving, is like the fire which nearly destroys the green room...

...He wants to get inside it and understand it himself...

...Yet the pathos of what he has done and of his suffering is completely irresistible in this final scene as well...

...Although she now says that it doesn't matter whether this one man is included, he insists that the man must be included after all...

...and in the film's opening scene when a friend attempts suicide in a paroxysm of grief over his own wife's death, Julien urges the same reason for living on him...

...On the contrary, it's killing him...

...This is what Cecilia inadvertently does to Julien when she points out that he must overcome his hatred for her late lover in order to achieve truly the love for the dead to which he aspires...

...It is this same man, it so happens, who was Cecilia's lover as well...

...He attempts to convert his love for his wife into an emotion that is immutable, noble and, ultimately, no longer human...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Having restored this neglected chapel at his own expense, Julien fills it with candles, one for each departed friend...

...Whether the candle she lights is the one Julien finally consented to have for the other man or the one she earlier agreed to light for Julien himself is a moot point...

...This man, Mien Davenne, who is played by Truffaut himself, has lost his wife at the point when the film opens and is devoting himself to the preservation of her memory...

...It grows and then wanes...

...We can hardly have helped noticing that, at the same time it gives him something purposeful to do with his life, it also makes him live more and more in the world of the dead...

...Finally one night he wanders out in the snow and returns to the chapel, where Cecilia has come too...

...But Julien attempts to convert that volatile, perishable fire that occurs in the green room into the constant, perpetual glow of the candles at the chapel...

...When he succeeds, he dies...

...Julien is so obsessed with the dead that we eventually begin to see him as one of them...

...He wants us to understand it and be moved by it, too...

...His walk in the intermittent moonlight realizes beautifully the way his mind keeps moving back and forth between this world and a nether one...

...A similar effect is achieved when Julien leaves the cemetery one night long after dark...

...The ending of The Green Room is clearly what Truffaut has been working toward throughout the entire film...

...This same quality in his feeling prompts Julien to go further so that, when a fire partially destroys "the green room" in his home dedicated to his late wife's memory, he transfers his shrine to a chapel at the cemetery where he includes as well all the other people he has known who have died...

...It is as if the living were gradually being transformed into still photographs too, like all the dead whom Julien gathers about him in pictures...

...Julien lives surrounded by the dead, literally, in the form of photographs...

...Then an extraordinary thing happens...

...What gives value to Julien's life is the almost complete absence of selfishness of a lpve felt for someone who can no longer return it...

...He wants us to accept this obsession of Julien's...

...Julien goes home to wrestle with his conscience about this matter, and in the process of overcoming this one last flaw in his love for the dead, he loses the will to live himself...

...Truffaut has stuck to a very flat and inexpressive style of acting throughout the film, giving Julien something of the character of a zombie, and scenes in which he appears tend to end, after the last line has been spoken or the last gesture rn^de, with the actors simply standing in place for a few seconds before the fade-out...

...In the concluding shot of the film she lights one more candle to add to the others burning in the chapel and at last complete the array...

...Whether he achieves all this is hard to say, but certainly the ending of the film is very moving...

...How truly mad, even ridiculous, Julien's life has become is obvious at the end...

...Julien is constantly moving into and out of deep, variegated shadows...

...In the green room itself, for instance, the light filtered through the trees outside is incredibly dappled and beautiful in an unworldly way...

...and having said so, he collapses and dies in her arms...

...When Julien discovers upon visiting Cecilia's apartment one day that this is the man whose loss she mourns, she discovers the imperfection in Julien's feeling for the dead...

...The truth gently emerging here is that the perfect love of his wife to which Julien aspires is not keeping him alive...

...Looking at the film, one can see why...

...The first of two parts...

...It is both candles at once, for it has been inevitable that lighting a candle for the other man would mean lighting Julien's as well...

...As he walks down the road toward the gate he walks in and out of brilliant, yet pale swatches of moonlight, almost like a divine light, shining down through the trees above him...

...The only flaw in Julien's love is that he retains an abiding hatred for one man, a former friend, now dead himself, who seduced and dishonored Julien's wife...

...He shows a mute child whom he is educating lantern slides of the war dead...

...His green room is filled with pictures of his dead wife, and later the chapel contains photographs of all the other dead memorialized there...

...Later, she confronts Julien about this at their chapel, but he still refuses to light a candle for this man along with the rest, and she walks out on Julien as a result, accusing him of insincerity...

...Julien's penchant for photographs of the dead even haunts him when, at the magazine where he works, they want to run an obituary of the ex-friend whom he hated...

...And with the aid of a young woman named Cecilia (Nathalie Baye), whose lover has recently died like Julien's wife, Julien dedicates himself to keeping all the candles alight...

...When Truffaut came to his press conference at the New York Film Festival, he brought director of photography Nestor Almendros along with him to take a special bow of his own for The Green Room...