The Woman Next Door

The Woman Next Door (La Femme d'à côté, 1981) is a François Truffaut melodrama you can watch online on iFILM. Bernard Coudray has a settled life outside Grenoble — a wife, a small son, an ordinary routine. Then a couple moves into the house next door, and the new neighbor turns out to be Mathilde, the woman he loved obsessively eight years earlier.

Gérard Depardieu plays Bernard, Fanny Ardant plays Mathilde. The fence between their gardens becomes a trap: two former lovers, each married to someone else, see each other every day while the old passion claws its way back. Truffaut keeps the tone calm, almost domestic, which is exactly what makes the ending land so hard.

This was Truffaut's penultimate film and one of his most clear-eyed studies of love that refuses to fit into a normal life. It marked Ardant's first major role for the director and the start of their off-screen relationship. Best suited to viewers who like French cinema built on glances and silences rather than spectacle. Stream The Woman Next Door (1981) online on iFILM.