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...It may not even be clear in the end why he has been preoccupied with questions of love and obsession...

...The first is about a woman who drives herself mad for love of one man, the second about a man who does the same out of an obsession to have all women...

...Cecilia and Julien's editor both urge him to overcome his hatred for this man...

...long as he rejects the memory of this one man, his efforts to memorialize all the dead whom he has known are insincere...

...Instead of leaving the frame empty at the end of a scene, he leaves the actors standing in it, in suspended animation, as if they too were a still photograph and thus part of the death imagery of photographs which pervades the film...

...The fact is that this man once seduced Julien's wife and is thus the cause of the only flaw in Julien's memory of her...

...In The Green Room, many of the photographs in the memorial chapel Julien and Cecilia tend are in fact people out of Truffaut's past as an artist...

...It is in the manner of raising the question that the only possible answers are implied even before the question is fully asked...

...In the opening scene as Julien arrives at the wake for his friend's wife, there is a shot or two where the camera stays fixed on vacant space after the characters have passed from the frame...

...Nor is it surprising Julien is so offended by this that he hides from the man, and afterwards repudiates their friendship...

...The reference to Bresson hurts Truffaut's film in a sense, for it reminds us what a truly unique cinematic style is like...

...And later still, when Julien abruptly walks out on the woman who is currently his closest friend, Cecilia (Nathalie Baye), and is challenged in like manner, his resentment comes to the surface again...

...Dealing with the latter problem is often what art is for...

...Perhaps the 8 December 1978: 783 ultimate question that Truffaut's films raise, fine as they are, is whether they have style of this caliber...

...Criticism as practiced by the French is an intensely dialectical affair...

...Three of Truffaut's last four films—The Story ofAdele H., The Man Who Loved Women and The Green Room—have dealt with obsession and love...

...Cecilia shares the responsibility for a perpetual vigil Julien keeps for the dead...

...Such style transcends all content...

...The feelings he cultivates, which he would now encourage in his friend, have about them the coolness and immutability of death...

...Truffaut shoots this amount from the same high angle he used in the opening scene, as if to make us see the connection between them...

...But on visiting her apartment for the first time, Julien discovers that the lover whose loss she mourns is the same man who dishonored his wife...

...A great style forces the peculiarities of the story or the subject at hand to conform to it...

...What neither Cecilia nor the editor see'm to realize is that this ounce of bitterness left in Julien is the last, slender thread binding him to life...

...No matter what the subjects, Truffaut's concerns always have this kind of symmetry to them...

...This third film combines certain aspects of both the preceding ones...

...But there is one influence apparent in The Green Room whose presence seems almost a detraction...

...I find his films very moving, as I have often said in these pages, and there can be no doubt that those films do have style...

...Because Julien has lost his own wife and now devotes himself to preserving her memory, he feels he can offer his friend something to live for...

...As they leave the offices of the magazine where Julien works, he comes into the stairwell below them and, seeing they are there, hides in disgust...

...Truffaut is a great borrower, and his films are full of allusions which acknowledge his debts to those who have influenced him...

...It is not surprising when the friend comes to visit Julien sometime later with a new wife, who represents his true return to the world of the living...

...This makes the Bressonian gesture something specific to Truffaut's film, but it also limits and reduces it as an element of style...

...It is "unworthy" of Julien the editor says...

...Or perhaps Truffaut's approach to this subject is not so much dialectical, in the detached manner of criticism, as circuitous, in the way that an approach to something must often be when one takes it too personally to confront it headon...

...The only answers art ever provides to such questions raised by its content lie in its style...

...It is the sole imperfection left in his love for the dead which keeps that emotion human...

...He is fleeing down the stairs outside the apartment when she catches up with him, and he turns angrily on her...

...Such style is epic, no matter how modest in either budget or intent the movie may seem...

...It has in it great passion, which is what's really needed to go on living...

...This is a gesture from the work of Robert Bresson...

...Perhaps this is a result of habits of mind acquired during the many years he spent writing criticism before he became a , filmmaker...

...This is the sort of style Bresson has pursued at all costs, even the cost of the wide popularity filmmakers usually need to go on making films...

...Julien is so upset at the result that he pays for it, and then smashes it to bits in a rage...

...It happens, for instance, when Julien goes to a mannequin-maker whom he has had cast a likeness of his dead wife...

...The great irony of this scene, as we come to realize when we know Julien better, is that in the very attempt to commit suicide the friend has shown a greater capacity to go on living than Julien himself possesses...

...The truth is that Julien himself re-engages life only on those rare occasions when he too shows a capacity for passion like his friend's in the first scene...

...I didn't see Fritz Lang there, though certain elements of The Green Room, and especially its chapel full of candles for the dead, seem inspired by Lang's 1921 Der Mu.de Tod...

...Screen ______ LOVE & OBSESSION DEATH, BE NOT PROUD IN THE OPENING scene of Francois Truffaut's The Green Room, Mien Davenne (Truffaut) calms a friend who has just attempted suicide in an excess of grief over the death of his wife...

...All the resentment Julien feels toward this man therefore pours out of him at this moment when he is challenged by his editor...

...The friend's attempt at suicide is, by contrast, an outburst...

...The three films weave an intricate band around their common subject...

...But the other-worldliness of Julien's life is disconcerting...

...A series of scenes which occur on staircases, since the camera is in each instance on the landing looking down at Julien, has in effect similarly high-angle shots...

...and Cecilia argues that as...

...It requires entertaining the matter at hand from contradictory views, the wayAdele H. and The Man Who Loved Women deal with alternative male and female forms of obsession...

...The intense spirituality of Bresson's films certainly makes allusion to them appropriate in this film, and gradually as The Green Room goes on Truffaut makes the gesture his own...

...On the same stair some scenes later, Julien's editor overtakes-him to question him concerning a slanderous obituary he has just written about a man the editor thought was Julien's friend...

...When he gives that up, as I explained in my previous column on The Green Room, he dies...

...Whichever may be the case, I don't think we can expect that Truffaut will ever really resolve his feelings about these matters...

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

...The first of these is the one where the widower brings his new bride to meet Julien...

...Whether Truffaut has the resources of style to provide even these tentative and elusive answers is hard to say...

...This doesn't mean, however, that they have a unique style, a style all their own, which is what art ultimately needs in order to be equal to its own content...