Jules and Jim (1962)

One of my all time favorites.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Spoilers. Observations. Opinions.Powerful. Smashing. Elegant.Saw this once before. Remembered the two men involved with one woman. Wanted to see it again, many years later.Daring story for the time. Manizing woman, not womanizing man, even though the men had seen other women. This time, her affairs are described, and she wants to stay free and easy, untied permanently to anyone. Jeanne Moreau is the star of this film, not the two men.She keeps paying the two main men back for their transgressions against her, and at the end makes a final payback again to both of them. Score one, two and three, but this time it is fatal.Jules is scratching his head at what to make of the whole thing. I don't see any tears, however. He makes sure that the other two in the triangle are sleeping side by side for all eternity. But what about the little girl? We don't see her near or at the end.Teutonic men may not make the greatest lovers. They are known to have an iceberg instead of a heart, and can be very selfish. They can be quite cold and heartless, but French men are well known for making women very happy in many ways. Paired with a French woman, Jim did better than did Jules. Jules couldn't keep women early on, and before he met Catherine he decided to take up with the pros. He couldn't even keep Catherine after he married her. She was way too much for him. Jim, however, had no problem attracting tons of eager women surrounding his newfound enchantment with Catherine. You never saw Jim hooking up with prostitutes.RIP Jeanne Moreau. I remember her grande dame from Ever After, in which at the beginning of the film she tells the Grimm Brothers that Cinderella was a real person, and her own great- or great-great-grandmother. The film goes on to show Drew Barrymore as a new filmic version of Cinderella, kicking butt of a hottie Prince Charming. Leonardo da Vinci even appears in this film, as a good friend of the future princess.Oskar Werner I remember from Ship of Fools and Fahrenheit 451. In real life, he was in the Nazi army of World War Two, although as an actual pacifist feigning incompetence and wanting KP duty even though his blonde hair made him an ideal Aryan specimen. His real heart lay in acting in the theatre, not in fighting on the battle front. His early theatrical career had been interrupted by the war.I am a degreed historian from the university, and am still involved in taking coursework in film history and war studies. I study the lives of actors and actresses, both stage and screen. I am an actress, dancer, singer, makeup artist, fashion designer, film critic and movie reviewer. I have critiqued almost 400 films and TV shows for IMDb since 2002.

Yes, Jules and Jim is a mesmerising, invigorating movie, full of life, love, happiness, sensuality, charm, and, not only that, it's French! But Truffaut's most famous film is not just ooh la la--it's an enormously sophisticated work, with a witty script and playful, daring camera work. In a way, it's THE film of the Sixties--a bit ahead of its time, for what we mean by "the Sixties" got going a few years later.But do I love it? No. Because the film also encapsulates, for me, what I so greatly disliked about the Sixties, the time in which I became an adult.The film was received with rapture, except by a few critics, including Dwight Macdonald and Stanley Kauffmann, who called it "less than meets the eye." They were denounced by Pauline Kael, queen of the hipsters, for being squares. And yet, today, who looks like the square--if by that one means someone insensitive and naive? Kael was normally clear-eyed, but, in her enthusiasm for the movie's spirit and technique, she bought a cynical fantasy, the one aimed at a young, educated, restless public.You see, in the Sixties the great thing to be was not intelligent or rich but "creative." I put it in quotes because the appearance of creativity often received the same adulation as the real thing. It was a time when the art scene started to go wild, when the business of covering yourself in paint, or whatever, and rolling on the floor was acclaimed. If you weren't genuinely creative, you had to get some way of faking it if you wanted to get respect, or laid. Women, of course, had an easy substitute for creativity. They could be selfish, capricious, inexplicably cruel or untrustworthy, and be acclaimed as their own great creation--marvelous, mysterious, incomprehensible WOMAN. (That is, of course, if they were good- looking; otherwise, someone who pulled these same stunts was just a nasty bitch.) This all happened before feminism, when it became fashionable for women to be serious, responsible grown-ups.So Catherine, in the movie, is WOMAN to the nines. But, even though she is very beautiful, she is still a nasty bitch. Surely a major aspect of WOMANliness is motherhood? Well, Catherine has a little girl who adores her, but she abandons the child for a lover (farewell scene not shown, and little girl never seen again in the movie--might it prejudice us against Catherine?). Then she abandons the lover when she is bored-- or thwarted. If she can't get her own way (even though the man is doing the right thing, or it's not his fault), someone has to pay for it.It is commonly said that suicide is an act of anger. This couldn't be more obvious in the case of Catherine, who, in the act of killing herself, drags an unwilling lover to his grave. Talk about wanting to have the last word! This is no starry Liebestod but petulance writ large.Jules and Jim may be based on a novel, but Truffaut's attraction to the material, as well as his recapitulating it twenty years later in The Woman Next Door, shows that the fantasy is very much his own. His immature, masochistic passion for this kind of woman was sad, but his presenting it to young, impressionable filmgoers as an enviable romance, with added culture (at one point they all read Goethe's Elective Affinities, also about a threesome) is wicked. The first thing about love is that it is UNselfish.

Decades of a love triangle concerning two friends and an impulsive woman (Jeanne Moreau).The film is based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel describing his relationship with young writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married. Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a bookseller along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who had published his first novel at the age of 74. The author approved of the young director's interest to adapt his work to another medium.The movie has been called "an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema", as Truffaut incorporated newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voice-over narration (by Michel Subor). Today, the influence continues in everything from "Goodfellas" to "Pulp Fiction" to "Life Aquatic" (three films you would not expect).

At the risk of over-generalizing about an entire nation, I've come to the inescapable conclusion that the French are a very strange people, to say the least. Seriously...they don't seem to find anything offensive (I think they'd find some rationalization for having sex with chimpanzees), and they seem to find everything interesting -- even one of the most boring films in cinematic history -- Jules & Jim.The one thing this film has going for it is this: I've never seen a film in which every single character suffers from an incurable mental disease. But if I want to see such extreme mental illness, I'll go visit a local state mental hospital. This film is NOT about LOVE -- it's about raging mental illness. That's what people who claim to "get it" really DON'T get. They're as delusional as the characters in this train wreck of a film if they honestly believe this movie is a great love story.