La camera verde

Francois Truffaut's wife died years ago, and he has since kept a shrine to her, a green room where he keeps her belongings, where he speaks to her. When he encounters Nathalie Baye, who seems to have a similar feeling about the dead, he can choose to be a man among the living, or build a chapel to the dead, to be completed with his own death.

Truffaut's adaptation of Henry James' "The Altar of the Dead" is a sere, underplayed movie about people who have given up on life in the aftermath of the First World War, and seek am excuse in the idealization of the dead. It's madness, but an attractively passive form of madness. Unfortunately, Truffaut, as great a director as he was, was not the actor to bring off this role.

I, too, have reached a stage in life when I know more dead people than living ones. I don't talk to them; they never shut up long enough to let me get in a word edgewise. But even these ghosts know that life is for the living.