FOR A CRITIC approaching Truffaut's last five films, it would have been tidier if the director had made The Woman Next Door and Confidentially Yours earlier and ended with The Green Room, Love on the Run, and The Last Metro. There is a finality to these three films—a sense of closure resulting from the theme of death in his adaptation of Henry James's work; the idea of the last portrait of Antoine Doinel; and even the title of his greatest international hit, Le Dernier Métro. But art is (mercifully) never as neat as the categories in which critics would sometimes like to contain it, and Truffaut's two final films provide an unsettling coda, a return to the thematic and stylistic concerns that marked his previous—and not necessarily best—work. Following the mature female characters that graced his films beginning with The Man Who Loved Women, the heroine of The Woman Next Door could be seen as a throwback to the selfdestructive femme fatale of the early 1960s Truffaut. And whereas Barbara in Confidentially Yours is a gorgeously feisty protagonist, the film recalls a cinematic universe more of style than of substance. Lighthearted but lightweight, Confidentially Yours doesn't quite constitute the signature that would complete the mosaic, the final stroke that proclaims a life's work consummated.