RE-RELEASED TO MARK THE 80TH BIRTHDAY OF JEANNE MOREAU, FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT’S NEW WAVE CLASSIC REMAINS ONE OF FRENCH CINEMA’S BEST-LOVED CELEBRATIONS OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.
As a notoriously combative critic in the 1950s, Truffaut lambasted French cinema for its conservatism. He had a particular dislike for the so-called ‘tradition of quality’, which he considered to be little more than a series of impersonal, academic literary adaptations. With Jules et Jim, which is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, Truffaut the filmmaker set out to demonstrate that transforming a novel into a movie could be a highly cinematic and personal affair.
Set in the years before and after WWI, the story concerns two bohemian young men, the Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and the Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), who form a seemingly indestructible friendship before their world is invaded by the beautiful yet volatile Catherine. As played by a vivacious young Moreau, the classic figure of the femme fatale is here invested with surprising charm and tenderness. Yet Catherine represents an ideal that is to destroy the friendship between Jules and Jim. She is the playful woman-child who is all things to both men, separately or together. She is also the goddess of fertility who is primitive and ruthless in her meting out of justice when displeased or thwarted. What is remarkable about Truffaut’s treatment of the material is the way it shifts with complete ease between lyricism and tragedy while deploying a battery of cinematic devices such as jump cuts, freeze frames and nostalgic iris shots. Classical references are combined with a thoroughly modern sensibility in one of cinema’s great depictions of a menage à trois.—Peter Walsh.