Torn: "Silken Skin"

Our love affair with the French New Wave continues unabated. Silken Skin/La Peau Douce, François Truffaut's 1964 follow-up to Jules et Jim, reappears in UK cinemas to herald the launch of a major retrospective of the director's work at the BFI Southbank, one that encompasses Emmanuel Laurent's new documentary Two in the Wave (which opens next week) and a new print of the essential Day for Night (which opens in two weeks' time). Where Jules et Jim was all freewheeling gaiety, you can see why Silken Skin caught audiences off-guard: a heavy sense of moral responsibility accompanies its efforts to map the spiritual footprint of the jet-set age.

At its centre is Jean Desailly's married Balzac scholar Pierre Lachenay, embarking on a fling with a glamorous air stewardess (Françoise Dorleac) during a layover in Lisbon. We sense this unprepossessing middle-aged figure, who has the mien of a provincial bank manager, has done rather well for himself in this arrangement; some may even admire the ingenuity with which Lachenay succeeds in keeping these trysts going - and hidden from his family - under the cover of meeting speaking commitments. Yet the scholar soon finds himself at the mercy of conflicting impulses: that for fame and self-promotion versus, in his personal dealings, a need for privacy, secrecy, to skulk about in the dark.

A fairly archetypal story of temptation and paradise lost, then - drawn from several newspaper accounts of the period - but one elevated by Truffaut's forensic attention to detail. Clock the first half's fetish-like observance of lights being switched on and off, or the way the camera is left running on the meter when Lachenay fuels his getaway car (and, in a manner of speaking, the affair) - an early indication of the film's interest in the price this man will come to pay, one way or another. Truffaut continually divides the screen into public and private spaces: those backstage areas where Lachenay is obliged to wait before being brought out into the spotlight, or the back of a cinema at an event where Dorleac is locked out in the cold; the final, most forceful violation occurs in an otherwise cosy patisserie the scholar has used as a home away from home.

There is enough in the material to warrant a sternly conservative, finger-wagging approach, but Truffaut proves rather fond and forgiving of his characters' foibles. When Desailly and Dorleac strand one of the former's colleagues on the porch of his hotel in order to drive away into the night, or as the camera catches the lovers playing dice in a botanical garden one afternoon, watching the square world pass by, we feel the director conspiring with these characters, rather than taking against them. Indeed, if there's a flaw, it stems from a certain imbalance in the casting: up until the moment Desailly's wife (Nelly Benedetti) is driven to give another passing Don Juan a very public dressing down, Truffaut appears at least as disinterested in the wife's part in all this, and as bedazzled by Dorleac, as his own lead character.

The film nevertheless retains the usual pleasures of these New Wave artefacts, not least as a record of another time, another place entirely: one in which the sight of Desailly undoing Dorleac's garters to reveal the flesh of the title could be enough to satisfy the brown-mac brigade, or when a literary scholar could be considered celebrity enough to pack out auditoriums beyond the Sorbonne. At one of these gigs, Lachenay quotes Pascal ("The tragedy of man is his inability to stay quietly in one room"), and while Silken Skin absorbs that maxim, it also expands upon it, offering a particularly telling example of man's inability to multitask. This is, Truffaut concludes, what can happen when you stretch yourself thin personally, professionally, romantically - as strong as you thought it was, the skin eventually tears, and someone invariably gets hurt. A print of the film should be delivered to every Premiership dressing room.

Silken Skin is re-released in selected cinemas from tomorrow.