Jules and Jim
Jules and Jim (French:
Jules et Jim) is a
1961 film by
François Truffaut based on the semi-autobiographical novel by
Henri-Pierre Roché.
Truffaut described the book as 'a perfect hymn to love and perhaps to life' . He came across it during the mid 1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books in
Paris and later befriended the elderly author who approved of the young director's attempt to translate the words on the page into celluloid images.
The film is set before, during and after the
First World War in several different parts of
France and
Germany. Jules (
Oskar Werner) is a shy writer from
Austria who makes friends with the more extroverted Jim (
Henri Serre). They share an interest in the world of the arts and the
Bohemian life. After encounters with several women, they encounter the free-spirited, capricious Catherine (
Jeanne Moreau) and both men are affected by her presence and her attitude towards life. After the separation that occurs during the war, Jules and Catherine marry and have a daughter. They invite Jim to visit, and later stay, with them. Their
ménage à trois becomes a
love triangle which leads, ultimately, to tragedy.
One of the seminal products of the
French New Wave,
Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopaedia 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 the virtuoso
Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with
Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight photographic equipment to create an extremely fluid and distinctive camera style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles. The evocative musical score is by
Georges Delerue and one song,
Le Tourbillon (The Whirlwind) summed up the turbulence of the lives of the three main characters, becoming a popular hit. The dialogue is predominantly in
French, with occasional lines in
English and
German.
Quentin Tarantino references this work in his film
Pulp Fiction in the line
"don't Jimmy me, Jules." A sequence from it appears briefly in a cinema scene in
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's
Amélie.
It is also heavily referenced in
Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky where: a clip featuring Jeanne Moreau appears during the finale montage; a poster for the film is displayed in the main character's bedroom; two best friends fall in love for the same woman -who leaves the insecure one for the passionate one- causing friction between them; a climatic scene envolves a woman driving her car off a bridge with her lover.
The song 'When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe' by
The Divine Comedy references
Jules and Jim in the lines "Jeanne can't choose between the two / 'Cos Jules is hip and Jim is cool / And so they live together".
*
Beatrice Wood*
Century of Film article from The Guardian newspaper*
Criterion Collection essay by John Powers
