Jules et Jim — Studio C

“‘Jules et Jim’ est superb,” The Daily Cardinal, September 2000

Late in Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, (showing through Thursday at the Majestic Theater), Jim, a writer having an open affair with his best friend’s wife, waxes philosophical, commenting: “New laws are beautiful, but it’s more practical to obey old ones.” The remark seems to echo the famous statement offered by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni on the occasion of the world premier of his breakthrough film, L'Avventura. Society, Antonioni argued, was “under the sway of moral forces and myths” which “cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate.”

Films were exploring radical new terrain in 1960 and directors like Antonioni and Truffaut were not simply asserting their creative freedom behind the camera and in the editing lab. L'Avventura and Jules et Jim are breakthroughs in terms of sexual ambivalence and psychological ambiguity.

It’s not surprising, then, that one was booed and the other banned. Jules et Jim had the latter honor, if only momentarily; it was outlawed in Italy and restricted to viewers over 18 in its native France.

After the surprising success of his first feature, The 400 Blows, Truffaut’s second effort, Shoot the Piano Player, was considered a failure. With Jules and Jim, his third film, Truffaut deliberately set out to counter prevailing perceptions of French New Wave films. More importantly, he wanted “an absolute success.” For that he turned to a novel he had found in the dusty stacks of a secondhand book store. The author was 76-year-old Henri-Pierre Roche, a first-time novelist who completed only two novels (both of which Truffaut adapted to the screen).

“My first deliberately boring film,” Truffaut was quoted saying in 1962, the year Jules et Jim was released. That, of course, is an exaggeration. The film, shot in Franscope on a modest budget, seems to reveal Truffaut’s joy of filmmaking in every shot. His use of closeup, freeze-frame, rapid cutting, lively camera movements and many other effects is never jarring and deftly reflects the playfulness of the characters on screen. Dialogue, even the narration, unlike that in other New Wave films (particularly Godard’s), seems almost peripheral to the film’s first half, as the poetry of the shots is absorbing itself and the physical action spells out the scenario rather clearly.

The same can’t be said for the film’s second half: dialogue and narration become integral as the subjects of Truffaut’s story — Jules (Oskar Werner), Jim (Henri Serre) and the woman both men love, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) — settle into their ambiguous roles in the film’s unhappy love triangle. Truffaut adopts their tone, making a perceptible shift away from the filmic whimsy of the first half.

In the end it all becomes a little exasperating, even as the tragic denouement is unfolding. But never is the film anything but refreshing in its self-conscious contradictions of New Wave theory and design. A must see.