The Soft Skin (French: La peau douce) is a 1964 romantic drama film co-written and directed by François Truffaut and starring Jean Desailly, Françoise Dorléac, and Nelly Benedetti.

Written by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, it is about a married successful writer and lecturer who meets and has an affair with a flight attendant half his age.

[3] Pierre Lachenay, a middle-aged married father and well-known writer, lecturer, and editor of a literary magazine, takes a plane to Lisbon.

She slips him her phone number on the flight back to Paris, and Pierre tries to call Nicole that night while he and his wife Franca are entertaining friends.

They go to a nightclub and plan to stay at a hotel, but they do not check in, as the circumstances begin to make them feel sordid.

He only agreed to his friend Clément's request to introduce a screening of Marc Allégret's 1951 documentary Avec André Gide so he could be alone with Nicole.

However, he has to go to a dinner, give his speech, and then go out for drinks with Clément, while Nicole sits alone at the hotel, cannot get tickets to the sold-out screening, and is repeatedly propositioned by a man in the street.

The film's screenwriters both have uncredited cameos: François Truffaut is the voice of the employee at the gas station at which Pierre and Nicole stop on the way to Reims, and Jean-Louis Richard is the man who incurs Franca's wrath after accosting her on the street in Paris.

[5] Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, calling it "uncannily prophetic",[6] and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice wrote a glowing review of the film, in which he said: "François Truffaut's fourth feature, The Soft Skin, has never gotten much respect -- even though many people (myself included) regard it as one of his best.

"[7] The film was released on home video in the United States by The Criterion Collection, which described it as a "complex, insightful, and underseen French New Wave treasure".