After I saw Truffaut's Two English Women, I thought that was the saddest film I have ever seen. But the list was rewritten after I saw The Green Room. Of course, before getting in touch with all those New Wave films, the saddest film for me was Titanic. I have watched Titanic for 26 times, and everytime, I still cried my heart out, although I know how melodramatic it is. However, I never thought sadness could be so deep without making you cry a single tear.Truffaut's sadness is unique: it does not make you cry; I bet anyone would shed a tear at his films--yet it sticks to you forever, keeping you in that nostalgic and gloomy state for your whole life.
The Green Room is a film about obssession and fetishism, which tells a story about a man who cannot let go of his dead wife, and does everything he could to remember her. Truffaut's character Julien is so angry with the society where people easily forget the death of their love that he calls this "injustice." In a world where "the dead asks for little and get less," Julien tries to give the death everything, more than he cares about the living.
Truffaut only appears in a limited number of films he directed, and The Green Room is one of them. There is certain much reference to Wild Child and Day for Night: such as George and Victor; such as his distance from emotionality. More importantly, Truffaut sees himself in these characters. Just as a line in The Green Room that goes: "he needs to be loved and he needs to love. No one likes solitude," Truffaut is always this street kid who is longing for love and who is actually afraid of loneliness. In the film, Julien's refusal to forget his wife Julie seem to be because of his inability to hold on to other things in life. In this sense, his devision with Paul is not only because how Paul can forget death, but also because how quickly he could relieve himself from the pain that Julien is and will be forever suffering.
