The Woman Next Door is a key film in the final phase of François Truffaut's career. His second film with Gerard Depardieu (a more muscular screen presence than Jean-Pierre Leaud) and the first of two Truffaut films with Fanny Ardant, The Woman Next Door has a story line right out of a soap opera. Fortunately, it plays like variations of a half-dozen other intelligent Truffaut films on the vagaries of love. Depardieu and Ardant evince such potent chemistry that it's hard not to root for their characters, Bernard and Mathilde, even as you see them slide toward tragedy. The key supporting character is neither of their spouses, but Madame Jouve (Veronique Silver), the crippled middle-aged woman who runs the local tennis club and owes her infirmity to a botched suicide over a long-ago love. Her backstory (and the possible revival of that affair) should inform Bernard and Mathilde, but they're too distracted (and haven't seen any Truffaut films about obsessive passion) to avoid plunging toward a bad end. Darker and more compact than his previous film The Last Metro, and more substantial than his follow-up and last film Confidentially Yours, The Woman Next Door may prove the summation of a great career tragically cut short by Truffaut's death in 1984.