François Truffaut pulls out all the
cinematic stops in his 1962 masterpiece,
Jules and Jim: voice over,
dolly shots, aerials, pans, wipes, masking, freeze frames, photographic stills,
newsreel footage. It’s like an overflowing portfolio of the possibilities of
film. And it’s a great story: two good friends, Jules and Jim, a German and
Frenchman, live the bohemian life in Paris before World War I, drinking wine in
cafes, talking about art, looking for love. A friend gives them a slide show of
ancient statues and they’re both taken by a marble portrait of a woman with a
mysterious smile. A few days later, they meet a woman named Catherine who looks
just like the sculpture, and so begins a 25-year saga in which both men are in
love and obsessed with her, and their triangular relationship shifts
dramatically over the years. It’s storytelling at its most sophisticated, with
an almost musical quality, more like a symphony than a movie. At times, years
go by in a breathless whir, as the narrator spins the yarn of the increasing
complexity of the trio’s love. Other times the pace suddenly slows, often to a
complete stop, with a freeze frame of the lovely Catherine, her blond hair
backlit by the sun. Or it’ll linger on a seemingly mundane scene, maybe
Catherine and Jim packing a suitcase, or the three of them drinking wine in a
meadow, or riding their bikes on a tree-lined lane. It’s all so beautiful, and
all of it together—the fast parts, the slow parts, the panacea of motion
picture technique—gives the film a fullness that’s rare in movies.
The film won the Grand Prix
(predecessor to the Palme d’Or) at Cannes, and is often included on lists of
the best movies of all times. It’s inspired generations of filmmakers,
including Martin Scorsese, who specifically hailed it as a precursor of the
riveting pace of
Goodfellas. In a gushing review, Roger Ebert wrote, “
Jules
and Jim was perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of (the
French New Wave’s) first astonishing films that broke with the past. There is
joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the
time.” Indeed, it still feels like cutting-edge art, despite being more
than 50 years old and in black and white. And not just stylistically. Even though
the story is set in the early 20
th Century, and the film came out a
few years before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, the tragic romance
feels contemporary, and infidelity abounds. Catherine is as liberated and
self-assured as any character who might grace the screen today, in many ways
even more so. And that’s what makes this film a true classic, its timelessness.
In another fifty years,
Jules and Jim will no doubt be as poignant as it
was when it came out, and as it is now.
- Joe Miller
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