François Truffaut (1962)
When I was eighteen I saw a book in W H Smith, in Coney Street, York that, as soon as I looked at the jacket and checked the contents page, I wanted. The Great Movies, newly published at the time, is the work of an American author, William Bayer (son of the screenwriter Eleanor Perry, to whom the book is dedicated). The front cover announced, above the block-capitals title, that ‘In cinema history, 60 films deserve to be called …’ I wanted the book because the sixty included my then favourite film, Cabaret (1972), and the introductory words on the cover seemed an appealingly authoritative confirmation of greatness. Bayer, who has subsequently had a successful career writing mainly crime fiction, isn’t himself a great writer about film. His methodology – he defines twelve genres (some of them overlapping) and selects five movies to represent each one – is a dubious means of constructing a canon. His short essays stand up well enough, though, and I’ve always been grateful for his book. It introduced me to films I’d not yet seen, have since come to love, and which would be at least contenders for a personal top-sixty list – All About Eve, Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Strangelove …, La dolce vita, 8½, Les enfants du paradis, The 400 Blows, From Here to Eternity, M, The Manchurian Candidate, On the Waterfront, Persona, Psycho (along with Cabaret). The downside of the book’s canonical flavour, in 1974, was that it intimidated me. I was nervous of voicing negative thoughts about any of the sixty classics – just as I was at the time, and later, about disparaging films I didn’t like that more articulate friends did. One plus of getting old is that I’m easier speaking my mind (at least on these web pages). A few years ago, I walked out of one of William Bayer’s selections – Only Angels Have Wings. I now don’t mind admitting that I’d pay good money to avoid watching another of them, The Wild Bunch, again. And there are plenty of films on Bayer’s list I rate somewhere between the two extremes – worth seeing, even repeatedly, but falling a little short of greatness. They include Jules and Jim.
Truffaut’s third feature (following The 400 Hundred Blows (1959) and Shoot the Pianist (1960)), Jules and Jim celebrates bohemian life in the years before and after the First World War, and dramatises, through a love triangle, the relative claims and weight of male friendship and heterosexual passion. The protagonists are two contrasting young men, both writers, and one extraordinary young woman. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy Austrian, Jim (Henri Serre) a more self-confident Frenchman. The capricious, enigmatic Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) – she demands and practises the sexual freedoms enjoyed by men but can also be a clinging vine – fascinate them both. In the summer of 1914, Jules marries Catherine. This doesn’t weaken the bond between him and Jim – nor, in the event, does the imminent conflict in which they fight on opposite sides. Once the War is over, Jim comes to stay with Jules and Catherine and their little daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin) at their home in the Black Forest. Jules confides in his friend about his wife’s inconstancy – Catherine has had numerous affairs and spends periods of time away from her family. She now tries to seduce Jim who, although he has a fiancée, Gilberte (Vanna Urbino), back in Paris, is still attracted to Catherine. Jules encourages the liaison: that way, he tells Jim, ‘she’ll still be ours’. They live as a ménage à trois until tensions between Jim and Catherine, resulting chiefly from their failure to have a child of their own, break up the relationship. Jim returns to France. A reunion is on the cards when Catherine becomes pregnant; it doesn’t happen, thanks to Jules writing to tell Jim of her miscarriage. When Catherine and Jules move to France, a chance meeting with Jim rekindles old passions and discords: after Jim announces his intention to marry Gilberte, Catherine pulls a gun on him, though he manages to escape. Sometime later, another chance meeting, in a cinema, leads to the trio going on a drive together. During a stop at a café, Catherine persuades Jim (you feel he’s asking for trouble) to get into the car with her: she has something important to tell him. As Jules watches, Catherine drives the car off a nearby bridge into the river. Jules is left to arrange the funerals of his wife and friend, and the burial of their ashes in Père-Lachaise.
I think this was the third time I’d seen Jules and Jim (over a period of some forty years) and I’ve been less impressed each time I’ve returned to it. The source material is a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. The screenplay, by Truffaut and Jean Gruault, includes large chunks of voiceover narration. I don’t know if these are lifted straight from the novel but, in a film as visually alive as this one is, the narration gets to feel superfluous, despite Michel Subor’s brisk, elegant delivery. There’s so much philosophy of love (and woman-as-the-other) stuff to listen to that Jules and Jim can feel like French cinema parody. At this distance in time, it’s hard not to think the film’s original impact had more to do with the freshness of the camerawork (Raoul Coutard was the cinematographer) and the fast cutting (Claudine Bouché edited) than with the themes of the story that Truffaut tells. This is grudging, though, when there are so many good things in the film. All three principals are excellent. Jeanne Moreau, with her uncanny knack for seeming volatile and no nonsense at the same time, is perfectly cast as Catherine. Her singing of ‘Le tourbillon’, a song composed for the film by Serge Rezvani aka Boris Bassiak (who also appears in Jules and Jim as one of Catherine’s ex-lovers) is justly famous. The narrative spans more than twenty years – from 1910, when Jules and Jim first meet, to footage of Nazi book-burning in the mid-1930s. A particularly strong aspect of Oskar Werner’s and Henri Serre’s portraits is that Jim, subtly but definitely, appears to get older whereas Jules continues to look the same – this seems to chime with the different scope of the two men’s personalities to adapt to new circumstances. Truffaut’s choice of a wide range of locations, in France and Germany, is highly convincing (the production designer, Fred Capel, also did the clothes). Georges Delerue’s music has great emotive fluency – it’s romantic yet amusing. Truffaut makes judicious, telling use of archive film inserts. The Parisian street scenes, remarkably, are no less striking than the footage of the Great War.
10 November 2021
