Director: François Truffaut (France). Year of Release: 1962
Paris, 1912. After we hear a woman’s voice saying “You said, ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘Wait’”, we quickly move to two men drinking in a bar. Jim is tall and dark-haired. Jules is blond and Austrian. He isn’t too short himself, but he’s dwarfed by his new friend. The narrator, now male, takes us through their sexual conquests. The self-confident Jim is more successful, but they believe in sharing, so he sends some women his friend’s way.
At a slide show, they see a picture of a statue of a woman with an inscrutable smile. They decide to go to the Adriatic to view the original, which they stare at for an hour at a time. This is one of the more annoying aspects of the film. Struggling to achieve your goals adds dramatic tension. If you’re never depicted actually doing anything to earn money, but can jet off to Greece on a whim, it does make it harder for us to identify with you.
After a brief liaison with a woman whose party piece is putting a cigarette in her mouth the wrong way round and impersonating a steam engine, Jules and Jim come across Catherine. Catherine is played by Jeanne Moreau and is therefore stunningly beautiful. Jules starts a relationship with Catherine, and eventually marries her and has a daughter. But she is restless and takes on other lovers, including – eventually – Jim.
War comes to add some seriousness to the generally frivolous tone. Director François Truffaut uses actual historic newsreel coverage to convincingly show us how war is hell. Jules and Jim find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict and the narrator assures us that each is mainly concerned that the worst thing possible would be to kill his friend. That’s enough seriousness for now, although we will witness some Nazi book burning on Bebelplatz before the film’s over.
Jules and Jim,, the characters, have a very possessive attitude towards relationships. At first, they share lovers, with Jim effectively acting as Jules’s pimp. When they first meets Catherine, Jules begs his friend not to make a play for her. Later, as his marriage his going sour, he assures Jim that it would be ok to make a move for Catherine. That way, she’d still be “ours”. At no time does anyone ask Catherine what she wants.
Catherine is rarely offered an opinion of her own. She’s a prototype manic pixie dream girl, who’s there to make the men feel better about themselves. When we find out that she carries sulphuric acid in her baggage as “vitriol for lying eyes”, thus is not seen as a comment on how unsafe it was for women to travel alone but on how quirky she is. Similarly, she is not allowed to argue with the boys. Instead, when she doesn’t feel that she’s getting enough attention she jumps into the Seine
Are Jules and Jim gay, as has been suggested by some critics? My first reply would be to point out that they are both fictional characters, which means that it would be wrong to speculate on anything that we don’t see on screen. And while we do see Jim rushing away from a girlfriend’s bed so that he can spend more time with Jules, this may just mean that he prefers hanging out with his Bro than the company of women. He may not be gay, he may just he a sexist pig.
Nonetheless, the film did show possibilities for sexuality which were not being offered by mainstream Hollywood. If you want to find reasons for going to see Jules et Jim, just look at the reaction of Christian fundamentalists. The Legion of Decency denounced it because “the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant and consequently pose a serious problem for a mass medium of entertainment”. Now that’s a film I’m interested in seeing.
Jules et Jim anticipated the sexual revolution, but even this was between detain parameters. There’s a reason why the film is called Jules et Jim and not, say, Catherine et Gilberte. While Jim’s on-off girlfriend is not awarded much time on screen, we see at least as much of Catherine as we do of the boys. The problem is that we see her almost exclusively through their eyes and those of the omniscient male narrator.
The film also anticipates development in film. The restless camerawork is familiar to a modern viewer, but 60 years ago it was a shot in the arm to an audience used to spending way over 3 hours watching Ben-Hur (released in 1959), Spartacus (1960) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962, the same year as Jules et Jim). Similarly, the lengthy narratives may grate now, but lengthy exposition while we watch other things happening was an innovative way of speeding up the action.
And, of course, Jules et Jim looks magnificent, a reminder of one of the ways in which old black and white films can be superior to their modern equivalents. Plainly put, it looks fantastic. Whatever reservations one may have about the superficial plot or the fact that women are constantly being shoved into the background, this is a film that looks like a work of Art. This is partly to do with the captivating presence of Moreau, but it’s much more than just that.
Like other contemporary nouvelle vague films, Jules et Jim is a memorable. People who haven’t seen Godard’s films still know the dance scene in Bande à part, or the one with Jean Seberg selling the New York Herald Tribune in Breathless. Similarly, when Jules, Jim and Catherine (wearing a false moustache) run across a bridge has become shorthand for nouvelle vague cinema. It is a scene which looks simple, but is (an overused word which actually fits here) iconic in its delivery.
(while we’re talking about the scene. Catherine puts on the moustache and a Chaplin hat and successfully bums cigarettes from passers-by, all of whom think that she’s a young man. Does none of them see the curve of her breasts sticking out beneath her jumper? I know this is a minor point that doesn’t have any major impact on the plot, but it felt just so unnecessary to me that it took me out of the frame. Maybe I just have no soul)-
Jules et Jim does what it is attempting to do very well. There is a case to be made that what it is attempting to do isn’t particularly interesting – to portray pampered wannabe existentialists as if what they think and do really matters – but it does so with such a panache that you’re generally prepared to indulge its weaknesses. I don’t think that it could have the same impact now as it did on release, but it still holds up pretty well.
CinePhil 