Jules et Jim (1962)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

Jules et Jim, François Truffaut's masterpiece, was one of the high points of the French New Wave, a film which, with its uninhibited portrayal of free love and male friendship, instantly caught the Zeitgeist and became a worldwide success. The film has often been characterised as being in the vanguard of the sexual revolution, challenging conventional notions about love and marriage whilst radically altering the portrayal of women in cinema.  This was not Truffaut's intention and, in the light of the director's subsequent films, Jules et Jim appears more reactionary than revolutionary.

Far from championing the era of permissiveness that came about over the following decade, the film seems to be a grudging endorsement of the old-fashioned sexual morality, an acceptance that, of all the possibilities open to us, the couple (la vie à deux) is the least bad solution.  The relentless search for the perfect love, which Jules et Jim depicts with such dramatic power and lyricism, can only end in disillusionment or disaster.   This idea, that human beings can never be totally happy in love and must learn to accept its limitations or else go mad, would become the underlying theme of Truffaut's oeuvre, and is one that would be painfully borne out in the director's own personal life.  Love is, and will always be, a matter of compromise.

Jules et Jim is based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same title by Henri-Pierre Roché, one of two books he wrote towards the end of his life.  Roché, a former art collector and art dealer, wrote the novel in 1953 when he was 73, and the book was virtually unheard of until Truffaut made his film adaptation.  It was by chance that Truffaut, then an up-and-coming film critic, came across the novel, whilst browsing in a bookshop in 1956.  What most struck Truffaut about Roché's novel is its innocence, which is somehow unsullied by its overt references to free love.  Having written a glowing review of the book, Truffaut began to correspond with Roché, then in his late seventies and bed-ridden, and the two nurtured a close friendship.  It was partly Truffaut's desire to adapt the novel for the cinema that motivated him to become a filmmaker, although Roché died just before his first film, Les 400 coups (1959), was released.  A decade after he made Jules et Jim, Truffaut would adapt Roché's second novel Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) and claim this as his one true masterpiece.

It was not until he had made two full-length films that Truffaut felt confident enough to adapt Jules et Jim, which he knew would be one of the defining films of his career.  Although his debut feature had been a runaway success, his second film, Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) was a commercial and critical failure, and Truffaut needed another winner if he was to continue working as an independent filmmaker.  When Truffaut began preparing his third film in 1960, the tide appeared to have turned against the French New Wave.  He was not the only director of the nouvelle vague to have taken a beating at the box office - Chabrol, Godard and Demy had all delivered flops over the past year and the popular press had begun to pin the blame for the declining interest in cinema on the New Wave intellectuals (television was the actual culprit).

Truffaut was caught in a dilemma.  He desperately needed his next film to be a mainstream success, but he was equally determined to remain as faithful as he could to Roché's novel, which he considered a literary masterpiece.  Truffaut was not content merely to tell the story contained in the book; he wanted to convey the essence of it,  its poetry and humanity, and to give the film Roché's very distinctive narrative voice.  Anything less would have been a betrayal to the author.  Truffaut's problems were compounded by money worries.  After the losses he had sustained on his latest film, Jules et Jim was going to have to be made on a shoestring budget.

At first, Truffaut was reluctant to make the film as a period piece, as this would surely bump up the cost.  It was his co-screenwriter Jean Gruault who convinced him that the extra expense of a period setting was justified, if not essential for the film's veracity.  One of the interesting aspects of the film is that whilst the costumes and set dressings gradually change across the twenty year span of the story, the main characters show no outward sign of ageing.  The transition is internal, not external, and it is only Jules and Jim who appear to be affected by the march of time, their youthful exuberrence giving way to middle-aged passivity.  Catherine, by contrast, is ageless and unageing, as immutable as the stone statue that bears her enigmatic likeness.  She is a force of nature, beyond time, and from our perspective her life is one that seems to have no direction or purpose.  Her reason to be, her insane quest for love, is both eternal and pointless.

The easiest decision Truffaut had was to cast Jeanne Moreau in the role of Catherine.  It was when he was a critic that Truffaut first fell in love with Moreau - he once described her as "la plus grande amoureuse du cinéma français", someone who exists simply to love and be loved.   (Orson Welles later referred to her as "the greatest actress in the world").  For the previous decade, Moreau had been cutting her acting teeth it in a series of generally mundane thrillers and melodramas before her true talents were revealed in Louis Malle's ground-breaking features Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958) and Les Amants (1959).  It was Moreau's portrayal of the unfaithful wife in Les Amants that brought her a certain notoriety, establishing her in the role of the fully liberated modern woman (one of cinema's first) to which she would be wedded for most of her subsequent career.   No actress in the world was better suited for the part of Catherine in Jules et Jim.

By the time Jeanne Moreau came to take on her most famous role, she and Truffaut had become the best of friends.   Before he made Les 400 coups (in which Moreau makes a brief cameo appearance), Truffaut had envisaged that she would play the female lead in an adaptation of René-Jean Clot's Le Bleu d'outre-tombe.  This project had to be abandoned when Moreau's 10-year-old son Jérôme died after incurring fatal injuries in a car accident.  The actress was delighted to work with Truffaut on his third film, and did what she could to help out on what was a financially constrained production (even allowing her Rolls-Royce to be used to transport camera equipment and props).  One of Moreau's most vivid memories of the film is the famous sequence in which Catherine jumps into the River Seine whilst Jules and Jim are happily discussing Strindberg's chauvinistic treatment of women.  Originally, the jump was to have been performed by a stunt double, but the latter managed to get herself so drunk (on rum given to her to steady her nerves) that, in the end, Moreau had no option but to do the stunt herself.  The actress spent the next two days in bed recovering from an infection.

The casting of the two male leads was more problematic.  For the part of Jules, Truffaut initially considered the rising star of Italian cinema Marcello Mastroianni but then decided he needed a German-speaking actor if he was to be true to Roché's novel.  He remembered Oskar Werner, a young Austrian actor of stage and screen who had made an impression on him in Max Ophüls' Lola Montès (1955).  As it turned out, Werner was as perfect for the part of Jules as Moreau was for Catherine and this is where he gives his finest screen performance.  Truffaut subsequently gave Werner the male lead in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), but by this time the actor had begun to succumb to chronic alcoholism and the collaboration was far from being a happy one.  For the part of Jim, which was closely modelled on Roché himself, Truffaut chose the unknown French actor Henri Serre, on account of his striking physical resemblance to Roché as a young man.  Serre's detached, cultivated screen persona makes an effective contrast with Werner's warmer, more humane portrayal of a man being slowly consumed by his inner demons.  Truffaut could hardly have chosen a better trio for his film.

Another important contributor to the film was Raoul Coutard, a favourite cinematographer of the New Wave directors who had previously photographed Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste but is perhaps better known for his work for Jean-Luc Godard.   Coutard was as much an innovator as the directors he worked for and his penchant for dramatic camera motion (tracking shots, whip pans, slow zooms and carousel panning) is put to good use in Jules et Jim, mirroring the flighty, restless nature of the heroine and underscoring the manic joie de vivre in the early part of the film.  Equally striking is the gradual change in the tone of the film, from the euphoria at the beginning to the melancholic gloom towards the end, reflecting not only the ageing of the protagonists but also their growing sense of disillusionment with love and life.  Coutard's flawless cinematography carries this transition brilliantly, so subtly that you hardly notice it, as does Georges Delerue's remarkable score.

Much of the poetry and pathos of the film comes from Delerue's wistful music, which evokes as much of the substance of Roché's novel (particularly the sense of juvenile zest for life gradually turning to dust) as does the crisp dialogue and voiceover narration.  The film's celebrated song, La Tourbillion de la vie - sung by Jeanne Moreau and accompanied by the musician Cyrus Bazziak - was a last minute addition.  The lyrics were created by Moreau and her first husband Jean-Louis Richard (who appears briefly in the film and later became a frequent collaborator of Truffaut, as actor and screenwriter) shortly after their break-up, and set to music by Bazziak.  Truffaut liked the song so much that he could not resist including it in the film, and it became an icon in its own right, known throughout the world.

Jules et Jim did not quite have the impact at the French box office that Les 400 coups had had (partly because it was issued with an over-18 certificate), but it did manage to attract a respectable audience of 1.5 million in France and met with almost universal critical acclaim.  What was more impressive was how popular it was on its international release.  Although the film was initially banned in some countries (notably Italy), it proved to be a worldwide hit and provoked a merchandising frenzy as it became a cult phenomenon.  Not only did Roché's novel go galloping up the bestseller charts around the world, Jules et Jim souvenirs (caps, tee-shirts, etc.) were soon turning up in shops.  The film secured the international reputation of both Truffaut and Jeanne Moreau and restored the French audience's faith in the New Wave at a time when it was perceived as a busted flush.  Half a century on, Jules et Jim has lost none of its freshness, daring and poignancy.  A profoundly moving morality play on the failure of love to meet our emotional needs and the durability of friendship, the film continues to enchant and haunt.  It remains cinema's most evocative hymn to that mysterious trinity of love, life and death.

Film Synopsis

It is in Paris, in around 1910, that Jules, a German, and Jim, a Frenchmen, meet and become the closest of friends.  Aspiring writers, they have a shared interest in literature, art and women.  Having encountered a statue of a woman's head with a beguiling smile, the two young men are surprised when they meet a young woman named Catherine with the same smile.  Both men are attracted to her, but it is Jules who marries her.  World War I then intervenes to separate the two friends. After the war, Jim travels to Germany to visit Jules and Catherine at their remote mountain home.  Although the couple have a daughter, Sabine, the passion appears to have gone out of their marriage.  Jim soon realises that he is still in love with Catherine and offers no resistance when she makes amorous advances towards him.  Realising that Jules and Catherine's marriage is failing, Jim imagines that by marrying Catherine he will be able to preserve their friendship.  If only Catherine's desires were so easily satisfied...