| Jules and Jim | |
|---|---|
original film poster |
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| Directed by | François Truffaut |
| Produced by | Marcel Berbert François Truffaut |
| Written by | Henri-Pierre Roché François Truffaut Jean Gruault |
| Starring | Jeanne Moreau Oskar Werner Henri Serre |
| Music by | Boris Bassiak Georges Delerue |
| Cinematography | Raoul Coutard |
| Editing by | Claudine Bouché |
| Studio | Les Films du Carrosse |
| Distributed by | Cinédis |
| Release date(s) | 23 January 1962 (French release) |
| Running time | 105 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Jules and Jim (French: Jules et Jim, IPA: [ʒyl e dʒim]) is a 1962 French film directed by François Truffaut based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund.[1]
Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books in Paris and later befriended the elderly Roché. The author approved of the young director's attempt to translate his work to another medium.
The soundtrack by Georges Delerue was named as one of the "10 best soundtracks" by Time magazine in its "All Time 100 Movies" list.[2]
The film ranked 46 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[3]
Contents |
The film is set before, during and after the Great War in several different parts of France, Austria, and Germany. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy writer from Austria who forges a friendship with the more extroverted Jim (Henri Serre). They share an interest in the world of the arts and the Bohemian lifestyle. At a slide show early in the movie, they become entranced with a statue of a goddess and its serene smile.
After encounters with several women, they meet the free-spirited, capricious Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a doppelgänger for the statue with the serene smile. Although she begins a relationship with Jules, both men are affected by her presence and her attitude toward life. A few days before the declaration of war, Jules and Catherine move to Austria to get married. Both men serve during the war; however, they serve on the opposing sides, and each fears throughout the conflict that he might have killed the other.
After the wartime separation, Jim visits, and later stays with, Jules and Catherine in Austria. Jules and Catherine have a little daughter, Sabine, but the marriage is not a happy one. Catherine torments and punishes Jules with numerous affairs, and she tells Jim that she once left Jules and their daughter for six months. She flirts with and attempts to seduce Jim, who has never forgotten her. Jules, desperate that Catherine might leave him forever, gives his blessing for Jim to marry Catherine so that he may continue to visit them and see her. For a while, the four of them live happily together in the same chalet in Austria, until tensions between Jim and Catherine arise because of their inability to have a child. Jim leaves Catherine and returns to Paris. After several exchanges of letters between Catherine and Jim, the relationship is broken off when Jules writes to inform Jim that his and Catherine's unborn baby has miscarried.
After a time, Jim runs into Jules in Paris. He finds that Jules and Catherine have returned to France. Catherine attempts to win Jim back, but he rebuffs her, saying he is going to marry Gilberte. Furious, she pulls a gun on him, but he wrestles it away and flees. He later encounters Jules and Catherine in a famous (at that time) movie theater, the Studio des Ursulines.
The three of them visit a park, and after lunch, Catherine invites Jim to get into her car because she has something to show him. After telling Jules to watch them, she proceeds to drive the car off the broken arch of a bridge, killing them both. Jules is left to dispose of the ashes of his friends.
One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles. The evocative musical score is by Georges Delerue. One song, "Le Tourbillon" ("The Whirlwind"), which sums up the turbulence of the lives of the three main characters, became a popular hit. The dialogue is predominantly in French, with occasional lines in German and one line in English.
Jeanne Moreau incarnates the style of the Nouvelle Vague actress. The critic Ginette Vincindeau has defined this as, "beautiful, but in a kind of natural way; sexy, but intellectual at the same time, a kind of cerebral sexuality, — this was the hallmark of the nouvelle vague woman." Though she isn't in the film's title Catherine is "the structuring absence. She reconciles two completely opposed ideas of femininity".[4]