© 2014 by James Clark
Jules and Jim (1962) is a staple of the French New Wave and thereby we brace ourselves for a monsoon of flip self-congratulation. In doing so, however, we should not close the door on valuable surprises.
The prime mover of this filmic flare-up, Francois Truffaut, turns out to be, even by movie standards, very volatile. We might best clarify our concern here by noting a moment from the DVS’s supplementary programming. The man who coined “auteur” (only to have a posse of such colleagues outstrip his daring and lucidity) is giving a TV interview whereby he wants to maintain, to a not fully won-over host, that his film is all about “two wonderful men and a wonderful woman.” After flashing a quietly smug smile at the recollection of how thrilled was the novelist, Henri-Pierre Roche, to have his original version of the narrative forming the prototype for the film, Truffaut proceeds to assure us that the questionably odd fusion of moods he brings our way is absolutely true to the writer’s purpose. Here is the helmsman’s rendition of the heart of Roche’s autobiographical work, an account which a perusal of the original writing would clearly contradict. “This story, with its shocking situation, is never scandalous or indulgent, because it is a tale about morality. But this morality doesn’t come from the outside world. It’s invented by the characters as they go. And never out of self-indulgence, but out of necessity… All this must have been very painful back then. Yet fifty years later, it enchants him…” Under further questioning, the ingratiating man of the hour warns us not “to believe it too strongly… It had to be filmed like an old photo album…”
New Wave: old photo album. Let’s try to make some sense of this. Jim tells his good friend, Jules, and Catherine, whom the latter man adores and wants to marry, “I’ve sold my book!” To celebrate, he’s bought front-row tickets to a new play in Paris; and we see this self-assured trio applauding its final curtain—Catherine with real enthusiasm, and the boys far less so. They stroll by the Seine late at night, and Jim, perhaps emboldened by his literary confirmation, states, “It’s a confused and self-indulgent play.” He especially leans on the work’s heavy dependence upon sexual adventurism, sexual conflict and shock (“a Swedish author”). That prompts a characteristically supportive Jules to cite Baudelaire’s very dim view of little hotties (a thrust bespeaking a pronounced incoherence, in light of the heavy trade in such women which the friends had demonstrated from the get-go). Catherine had maintained, “All the same, I liked that girl [in the play, namely, Strindberg’s Miss Julie]. She wants to be free. She invents her own life every minute…” And now Jules runs off at the mouth, generating a remarkable load of waggish insult, delivered with precious priggishness from out of a baby-faced, angelic demeanor. Despite his previous output of self-important pedantry, until then we had come to assume he was unfailingly kind, in addition to being a carefree customer. After volubly finding it necessary that in a marriage the woman be faithful but not the man, he recalls the poet’s tirade, “Woman is natural and therefore abominable… The greatest idiocy confined within the greatest depravity… I’m always amazed they allow women to enter churches. What could they have to say to God?” Shortly after that, Catherine, whom we watched walking along, impassively, while this indiscretion was taking place, jumps into the Seine—tipping the balance of power in her favor.
For a few moments the men are considerateness itself. But what the saga of Jules et Jim chooses to disclose to us is rabid self-indulgence amongst three youngsters from indulgent families who never for a moment deign to plunge into serious self-doubt. After Catherine murders Jim by way of suicidally driving her car off a bridge (with him in the death seat and with her flashing an eerie smile), Jules, her nominal husband, arranges for their cremation and burial. The voice-over—supposedly coverage by the pleased-to-be-chosen novelist—tells us, “A sense of relief flooded over him.” In fact he plods through this fork in the road as if he would soon be getting back to the science journalism that suited his comfort zone of minutiae diverting him from painful reflection. His final words to us concern Catherine’s no doubt often iterated wish to have her ashes scattered to the wayward winds. “… but that was against regulations…” As we hope to discover now, the resentment, the “getting even” (so deep-seated in Catherine) very apparent in that scene, constitutes the welter of abrasiveness belying the auteur’s assurances that his film is a pure gift of bracing affection; but at the same time, catapulting his work into some proximity to the problematic excitements of his many colleagues working without his kind of desperation to seem part of an old photo album.
The engine that pulls Jules and Jim into a pantheon of sorts (and into a display of romantic pyrotechnics) is the unremarkable phenomenon of children from wealthy families seeing themselves as artistically talented and being well-suited to ignoring exigencies of making a living. Jules, just in from Germany, meets Jim somewhere in the playground that was Paris in the years just before the Great War that, for many adults, came to represent the end of that carefree “innocence” covered by the term, Belle Époque (Cool Era). The voice-over informs us that each of them found in the other the same gusto and the same avenues of validity that he himself had embraced as the way to go. Therefore, Jim was eager to introduce Jules to a reservoir of fun-loving, amorous girls like that he would have frequented back home, and he was a bit taken aback that the cool chum he was so pleased to invite to the 4ZArts Ball would be hurt by one of his new party dolls going home with another reckless hipster. “Let her go, Jules. Lose one and get 10 more…” Garrulous, fidgety, attention-deficient, the pals of callow poetry are arrested by a classical bust shown in a slide-show of images by Albert, who, they readily concur, “Knows everyone who will become famous ten years from now.” (It would never occur, to these two cultural heroes in the making, that becoming famous is a mug’s game.) Their subsequently dashing off to the Adriatic, to wolf down a close encounter with the female figure’s serenity and coherence, provides a sense of the depth of their pockets and the shallowness of their sensibility. Back home, they’ve forgotten all about the life-changing event, buying each other “the best cigars” and loping through an effete version of kick-boxing (in a gym where confreres do similarly unreal fencing and exude the most feeble facsimile of struggle). Jules comes into contact with some friends of friends back home, one of whom, Catherine, jogs their memory because of her striking them as akin to the stony and sunny sensation on the Adriatic. Jules, the worrier, tells Jim, “But not this one, right?” (which is to say, she’s inspired him to imagine domestic serenity forever). They go for a romp in the (generally cloudy) City of Light apparently inducing major issues—Catherine dressing up as a man, adding a pencilled moustache, and delighted that a guy on the street asks “Monsieur” for a light. Already obviously more effective at expensive trips than working at home, they, as the voice-over from Roche’s text reads (in its function as confirming an affair of some prominence), “searched up and down the coast for the perfect place…”
Fixed up in a large villa in the Southern sun, they make abundantly clear that compelling illumination and equilibrium are not likely to shine on them. Before they left, miffed by the Paris cloud and damp, the boys could see that Catherine was marching to the sound of a different drummer from that easy listening which they preferred. Her sense of fair play was clearly not up to their chivalric, equitable delicacy. A foot race being proposed, she jumps the gun. “But I won” was her way of ending their protests. Burning letters that now annoy her, on the floor of her flat, she has her long, Belle Époque slip catch fire. During a spate of the boys playing dominoes and Catherine making inane remarks to attract attention (earlier, on the beach, she had rattled off [pedantically using a bit of English] an infantile notion of the world as a [her?] little toy, and they had taken her seriously), Jules, deeply into his game, tells her to scratch her own back. She rushes over to him and gives him a vicious slap in the face. Jules is shocked and saddened. Then she flashes a smile (of indeterminate warmth) and chuckles and he and Jim laugh along with her—begging the question: What in heaven’s for?; she becoming obviously far more idiotic than even they are, and vaguely venomous, something they at least had been able to sidestep in themselves. Before the trip to the Mediterranean, Jim had told his infatuated friend, “She’s a strange breed.” He had gone on to persuade her to dispose of the vial of sulphuric acid she wanted to tote southward as a weapon against hot-blooded presumptuousness. During a hike at their expensive slice of paradise, Jules frets, “I’m afraid she’ll never be happy on this earth…”
So what’s up? Can we (should we) resist calling Truffaut the French Pasolini, pleased to acidify modernist world history for the sake of an only resort in the form of brief and primitive sentimental consolations? World War I arrives and the chums become adversaries on paper but friends, anxious about each other’s safety, in fact. Documentary footage of the hellish struggle in the trenches, interspersed with Jim on leave with a rather melancholy girl, Gilberte, and Jules at an officers’ bivouac, culminates in their reunion at Jules’ chalet in German hill country (he now married to Catherine and the father of their young daughter) where he jocularly complains to his friend, “So you won the War, you louse!” Whereas, as mentioned, many adults found in the Great War an inducement to reflect upon human nature and the difficulties of world history, Jules and Jim—from out of their vast commitment to personal satisfactions—find it to have been a minor dislocation and, in Jim’s case, a cue to assemble a melancholy (true) tale of a comrade having made to blossom a romantic correspondence with a woman back home only to die on the eve of the Armistice. Jim has arrived in his friend’s neighborhood to do a series of newspaper articles about the post-War state of life in Germany (the perspective of Jules’ hideaway being a clearly less than optimal vantage point. But it is impossible to imagine that sometimes correspondent ever seriously dealing with a subject like that. Truffaut very definitely, though not readily recognizably, insinuates the provocation that, coherence be damned, our best bet is to let loose with paroxysms of greedy advantage and leave difficult reflection to suckers. At their love nest Catherine is moved to feign an interest in the short hair styles of women having facilitated their being up close to dangerous war-manufacture machinery. That reminds us of Proust’s novel, Remembrance of Things Past, where rich ladies regard the War as inspiration for smashing new fashion statements. In fact that source informs Jules and Jim in many ways. Roche’s Jules figure is based upon the German translator of Proust’s novel, Franz Hessel. The names Albert and Gilberte recall two of Proust’s protagonist’s worrisome lovers, Gilberte and Albertine. Truffaut is only too sanguine about the Proustian protagonist being inexhaustibly driven to strike a vein of integrity within a baffling social and personal experience, and thereby strikingly showing his film’s luminaries to be articulately disturbing louts with an appetite for bingeing.) Jules announces, “I received a commission for a book on dragon flies…” going on to spray the ironic, “… I have a bad habit of overspecialization…” On the other hand, after the boys fish Catherine out of the Seine, the voice-over gives her this much: she “smiled like a young General’s first victory.”
The ensuing romantic triangle becomes bogged down (a bit like the forgettable war) in that chalet and the surrounding nice scenery. Unsurprisingly, she has abandoned Jules and their daughter, Sabine (a name seemingly groping for gravitas), teaming up with Albert (Proust’s Albertine being very fond of women) to make, if not beautiful, diverting, and self-revealing music. But, back in place for Jim’s visit, she holds forth as a Siren, playing upon the boys’ need to rise above their palpable doldrums and taste some passionate affection with her, intensity that might elicit some poetry within their stilted poetasting. Soon Jim is ensconced in her bedroom (Jules, ever chivalric, playing the part of a pony to his daughter’s carriage driver), after an initial moment of correctness in staying at a nearby inn. Albert comes by to finish a song with her; then she’s back to Jules. Jules has told his friend, “I admire how wide you cast your net, Jim.” At that point, Catherine tells the tall, dark and handsome Parisian (Jules being short, blond and geeky), “I see a great career for you. But not a spectacular one.” Jules agonizes in private with his friend, “She acts in revenge for something I did…” Still more to the point of a cadre strangling itself the better to demonstrate a supposedly sublime paradox of sufficiency, Jules gives a pedantic monologue on the gender of French nouns; Catherine gives a pedantic monologue on the rich variety and quality of French wines. She tells Jim, “I felt I was in the arms of a stranger… and then he left for the War.” “Our happiness didn’t take here and we were left face-to-face,” Jules tells Jim. As if a great (though not spectacular) singularity had occurred in the (to her) endlessly engrossing saga of her affections, she intones to her tall French beau (apropos of her living, for a while, with the short French beau, Albert), “One day I missed Jules’ indulgences, his unhurried ways…” As she tires of Jim, especially in light of his mentioning he was involved with Gilberte back in Paris, the voice-over (Roche’s more forthright darkness) gives us to understand, “Catherine had said, ‘One only loves for a moment…’” Jim’s furloughed back to France where, perhaps shell-shocked, he insists to Gilberte, “I’m going to marry Catherine…” But he becomes increasingly loyal to the former, thereby infuriating the latter and inducing her to send a stream of desperate pleas that he come back to Germany. And so on with that battlefield of romance rather proudly (certainly enlisting impressive cinematic invention) proffered, which we cannot help recognizing as life at its best.
Catherine writes to Jim, “I think of the child we’ll never have.” Patient and generous to a fault, Jules manages to shift his and Catherine’s real estate back to the Paris region, Jim having settled down there with Gilberte (despite Jules’ every effort to get his friend and his wife back to conjugal bliss). And the old friends bump into each other at a movie theatre showing a newsreel of Nazis burning books. Afterwards, at a cafe, Jules states, “Now they’re burning books.” “Yes, it’s incredible,” Jim glumly and pointlessly reflects. Immediately the troubling juggernaut is forgotten; and the all-important subject of their Byzantine sexual and affective life elbows the Nazis off the front page. Jules intones, “For you, Catherine was easy to get but hard to keep… Your love soared and crashed. I never had those highs and lows…” The Nazis and their predations could not be engaged within the purview of those Belle Époque dandies. But on the other hand, corrosive inertia was the substance of their lives. While the credits open the show, circus clown whoopty-do fills the air, the principals brimming and beaming with giddy letting fly their passion for silliness. First a sculpted head on the Adriatic, and then Catherine as the designated goddess, introduce magnetism effectively dispensing with equilibrium. The smog of more or less clever melodramatic talk settling over their sexual racetrack can only confirm more forcibly that a deadly slide is seen to somewhat prime divine effervescence. (Her toying with a footrace countdown of the number 3—jumping the gun on the lumpen boys—becomes a metaphor of vicious appetite toward the possibility of accomplishing feats of integrity, a short-cut out of which could flit sparks of (overestimated) energy. Jules et Jim rapidly settles into a headlong ricochet masquerading—the first shot has the boys dressing for a costume ball—as having an adult purchase upon the reflective reservoir of world history. The boys are quick to do arts parties but demonstrate lacking the grip to do arts, clever phraseology notwithstanding. (Throughout, their passion for dominos fits into the trend.)
There is a moment (long before that inertial, non-sufferance of frustrated appetites, plunge off of the bridge) when Albert drops by and Catherine girlishly hammers the on-site slugs by claiming that the visitor and she have to complete (something foreign to them) a serious example of musical poetry. The result is a paean to the “whirlpool of days” to which they have given their hearts. “We met, said adieu/ and then met anew…”
As mentioned, but worth repeating at this parting shot, drifting over this torpor is the faint reminder of a bona fide tortured passionate misadventure, that of Marcel Proust’s novel, Remembrance of Things Past. It consists in the names Albert and Gilberte. Roche’s Jules here (to his Jim) was the German translator of that novel. Proust’s Gilberte was an early object of the novel’s protagonist’s desires; Albertine came later. Their quiet little visit to this noisy film proffers (by way of provocative obviation of such quiet by such noise) the measure of epiphany-touched romance as a phenomenon which could be overtaken by a bizarre massively contaminated form of disinterestedness. Let’s close our occupation of this oddly edifying entry by trying to fathom Truffaut’s positioning in undertaking such a dismissal of so profound a delineation of human sensibility. Was he having his little shallow thinker’s joke with a deep thinker—thinking (as Pasolini did, in Arabian Nights, apropos of the epiphantic moment in Antonioni’s Red Desert) that his “tortured” sense of contaminated affection could carry matters beyond naifs like Proust and Antonioni? Did he realize that Roche’s deployment of the two names from a monumental literary accomplishment was an enactment of putting in their squalid place weakling’s that he (Truffaut) was impressed with in their being ripe for rescue by a religious power? Was he, like Pasolini regarding Antonioni, determined to attack the thoroughgoing secularity of an impressive irritant, in this case, Proust?
Near the film’s end, Jim sophistically tries to reason with feet-on-the-ground Gilberte, apropos of Catherine’s dalliances. He actually can say (without laughing out loud), “She hopes to attain wisdom one day” [by that means]. To which his long-suffering friend can’t resist teeing off, “That could take a long time.” Jim’s “Don’t be mean,” cannot begin to dispel the readily recognized cheapness of that energy. (Catherine had told Jim that her recent fling with Albert in retaliation for Jim’s lingering in Paris with Gilberte had about it a mathematical imperative. Albert equals Gilberte.”) Was there any malaise, by Truffaut, about that joy division hitting the mark? Does Anton Corbijn’s film, Control (2007), revisit this matter? Does, even more strangely, Billy Wilder’s film, Avanti (1972), with its elderly lovers (one of whom being called Catherine, Kate) dying in an embrace, when their car goes off the road, fall under the troubling spell of this project? (Roche’s fatally injured lovers are strewn apart in their death plunge, a situation by which the writer aims to emphasize the cheapness of those sensibilities Truffaut hopes to palm off as brilliant lovelies.)
Though the auteur explicitly hopes to convince us that his Jules et Jim “redefines love,” his portrayals take us nowhere special. To be able to tingle, like Hitler, no doubt, from tenuous electricity amidst an interpersonal romp dedicated to the aggrandizement of selves ravenous for an easy attainment to royalty status proffers nothing impressive to a viewer ready to be seriously surprised. The long and futile gallop for a “whirlpool” that works may indeed set off some fleeting sparks that brush upon Proust’s territory. But their being bound to a vapid paradox of lovelessness misses Proust’s point of a difficult saga of consistency in a sufficing always in suspense.
This has to be one of the best essays yet in the series. Wonderful stuff. I saw the movie when I was about 16 during what must have been its second London run (remember when movies had two or more runs?) at a wonderful arthouse cinema that used to be (and for all I know still is) about 200m north of Marble Arch, and liked it a lot even though, for age reasons, I was probably able to understand about half of it. I’ve not really thought about it much since, but now you have me craving to see it again.
Thanks, John.
I also encountered most of the “advanced” movies, of the era of Jules et Jim, in one place. In my case it was a little dungeon tucked away in an otherwise unmarketable location in a suburban mall. I would walk home by way of a tony district right across the river from the shops, resembling the sites of Antonioni oligarchs, en route to my family’s house, very different from that.
It’s interesting, I think, to consider how one would frequent such a place, not so much for its specific component but for a tone that seemed special. Thereby all the films would come to seem the same—like being at a favorite bar where all the nights blur into one.
I’m also reminded of this by the Toronto Film Festival tag line this year, “This is Your Festival.”
For a few moments the men are considerateness itself. But what the saga of Jules et Jim chooses to disclose to us is rabid self-indulgence amongst three youngsters from indulgent families who never for a moment deign to plunge into serious self-doubt. After Catherine murders Jim by way of suicidally driving her car off a bridge (with him in the death seat and with her flashing an eerie smile), Jules, her nominal husband, arranges for their cremation and burial. The voice-over—supposedly coverage by the pleased-to-be-chosen novelist—tells us, “A sense of relief flooded over him.” In fact he plods through this fork in the road as if he would soon be getting back to the science journalism that suited his comfort zone of minutiae diverting him from painful reflection.
Fascinating perceptions Jim, and a vital piece of scholarship. JULES AND JIM unfailingly exhibits audacious film making. Visually exquisite (who can forget the shot in which the three shutters of the white beach are thrown open in the brilliant morning sunshine) and an unending succession of set pieces that joyfully showcase the possibilities of the camera. Oskar Warner and Henri Serre are physically attuned to their characters, but of course it is Jeanne Moreau who delivers the truly great performance, alternating between egocentric, tyrannical and wholly irresistible. Surely one of the French cinema’s most rightly celebrated turns. JULES AND JIM has the quality of a “dream film,” lyrically suffused as it is with buoyancy, flashes of exhilaration and shades of the dark side that inhabit all such suspensions of consciousness.
Thank you, Sam.
I, too, am a fan of Jeanne Moreau; I find the murderous energy she emits in Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black to be far more cogent than the Selfie binge in Jules et Jim. The former film evokes an essential problematic of severe, dangerous indifference on the part of the world at large; the latter dispenses with the world, the better to contrive an infantile miasma.
The latter state of affairs makes it a tough sell as an affecting love story. I think the genius of the genre of romance is predicated on being able to recognize an impetus that takes us beyond personal aggrandizement.
Jules et Jim has, I think, strangely and of course inadvertently taken upon itself a thrust into our own era of technical superficiality essaying grotesque facsimiles of loving emotion.
Great post! For me, the most interesting aspect of this film is that it was adapted from a novel written by a 75-year old author. The storyline and the characters feel so youthful, but the feeling of melancholy that seems to pervade the end of the film (a glance into the past and a look to the future) seem quite apt.
Thank you so much.
Henri-Pierre Roche, whom I’d never heard of until tackling this project, was a real live-wire—at the cutting edge of avant-garde painting, in the capacity of an arts writer and promoter. And he had links to Proust. From out of his being so conversant with still crucial matters he was able to imbue his late writings with a young person’s dash, while having a trump card of long experience.
Terrific review of one of the cinema’s most heartbreaking romances – a menage a trois of reflective brilliance. Jean Moreau is a revelation.
Thank you, Frank.
Your appreciation of Jules and Jim would, I think, be in tune with Sam’s incisive notion of the film as “audacious.” We have to hand it to Truffaut for taking our breath away with the sheer cheekiness of his saga and its only-too-incontrovertible majority status. If only he cared that versions of the train wreck befalling the protagonists are common.
Thank you for your brilliant essay. I agreed with your assessments at almost every point. When you described Truffaut as a cheap and easy version of a deep thinker as opposed to a truly serious deep thinker, I thought, “Bingo!” That is what I’ve always felt about his films. But it’s also easy to be enthralled by them–if you just don’t think about them too deeply. Part of this charisma is explained by something simple and powerful: the look of his protagonists (how beautiful Moreau and Werner in particular look in your beach scene still) and the fact that, if they don’t have real substance, they sure as hell have style: blazing out of every orifice, in fact. The obvious idiocy of Jules and Jim slobbering for fifteen (?) years over Catherine’s fraudulent mysteries is somewhat understandable when we consider her beauty, the nihilistic liberties she takes, her incredible high-handedness and sadistic irrationality. To the weak-minded, these are goddess-like attributes. I saw the movie when I was twenty, with a male buddy. We disagreed about Catherine. He gushed, “She’s mysterious…glamorous…irresistible…” “But,” I said, “she’s such a terrible bitch!” “Yes,” he answered earnestly, “but she’s a REAL WOMAN.” I think that the majority of those who see the film agree with him. I think that Truffaut did too; and that he would have (mistakenly) disagreed with many of your perceptions. For example, the question of exactly why these three have the freedom/money to go wandering around at whim doesn’t come up in the film. It didn’t interest him. I think his treatment of their relationships was unironic; and that probably until the day he died it made sense to him that Jules and Jim should worship Catherine because of her…archaic smile.
What a generous and well-developed reply Margaret! Thank you.
I think you pinpoint a very important feature, in the form of the narcissism such “beautiful people” quickly intuit to include a carte blanche for a lifetime of partying, a dimension readily inferred to be entry into a form of royalty. Along that sight-line, they would behave much like classical gods. Truffaut exploits such an impetus to bring to us his proud assessment about such dilemmas as we see in Jules and Jim being the site of an elemental truth.
As you say, the vast majority would imagine that current of histrionics to be as good as it gets. But a surprisingly large number of more comprehensive films than Jules et Jim—for example, Marienbad, Birth, Boyhood and A Most Wanted Man—invite us to discover that the majority take on such matters is catastrophic and the subject of endless scrutiny and gambles far less idiotic than those of Jules and Jim and Catherine.
I largely agree with the author’s overall opinion on this film, which has never quite moved me. (On the other hand I do love Truffaut’s Doinel series I must say, especially Stolen Kisses which is delightful)
Truffaut has often been called The Man who Loved Women (also the title of a particularly autobiographical film of his of course) but might as well be called the man who idealised women. There’s no getting away from the fact that very often in his films the female characters are just a mystical, inexplicable, enigmatic ‘other’ to be worshiped and idealised merely for their woman-ness, without much attempt (or any) to understand anything beyond the surface. I wonder how much the same reproach can be made of Godard too.
Thanks, Giovanni, for bringing out, in the context of Jules et Jim, those films giving the puckish (nearly Harold Lloyd-like) charm of Jean-Pierre Leaud the opportunity to plumb a more benign zone of the free-fall situation so beloved by Truffaut. I recall that in Breillat’s 36 Fillette he advises the young girl-protagonist to just jump on any bed because it will always lead to a happy place.
I really like your perspective here Jim. I truly love this film yet there is something rather enigmatic about it. It is romantic, but also un-romantic in a way. It is memorable, and at other times almost like a blank slate. Every time I watch it, I feel like I don’t remember anything from it. I love it while I’m watching it, and once it’s over it drifts away. It has a strange kind of power to it. It has something to do with the pacing, and the writing and I do think it’s all a grand plan in a way. There is a kind of beautiful melancholia about the whole thing.
Thanks, Jon, especially for your term, ‘perspective” here. Like his unacknowledged soul-mate, Pasolini, Truffaut did indeed work in view of a “grand plan.” As such, his films fascinatingly mine a watershed in modern history— namely, the point whereby people become energized by the prospect of their sensibility being tuned by a phenomenon light years away from the tuning priorities of world history hitherto, and their catchment of candid, self-assured sweethearts (sort of). Truffaut and Pasolini, men desperately anxious for assurances about a happy, loving place, set their sights on circumventing the impulse toward that departure. (With its tag line— “This is YOUR film festival”— the current Toronto Film Festival gives its patrons to understand that in Toronto the “pretentious” films to be found in abundance in Cannes, Berlin and New York will be safely eclipsed by “normal” priorities.)
There is no mathematical resolution of this difference. Pretentious films will continue to thrill its constituency with the daunting problematics of a world comprising parallel lives. The cinematic means to elicit concentration upon that troubling and thrilling venture will deploy sensuous means to illuminate a difficult situation which is intrinsically carnal, not intellectual. Two weeks from now I’ll be showcasing that film having provoked an angel chorus on the theme of “pretentious,” namely, Last Year at Marienbad.
I am coming back for more of deeper read. Since I have never ever seen this film the review confuses the heck out of me. I am sure it is a worthy read!
Jeff, your candid response is most welcome.
The tag line of this essay, as to a “confused” (and self-indulgent) venture, is, I think, indicative of Truffaut’s being very aware of the murderously complex and quite perverse outlook being floated in this film. I think Truffaut is something of a throwback to the medieval theologians, the most notorious reflection of which being, How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? I’ve tried to trace the more coherent context for his riff, because this whole quagmire broaches important difficulties facing more rigorous investigators, including many contemporary film makers.
A highly perceptive review. Certainly the Roche’s semi-autobiographical book is just as shallow and indulgent as Truffaut’s film, and characterises Roche’s ‘silver spoon’, matricentric existence. Truffaut remarks on how Roche crossed out all but a few lines on each page on the Jules et Jim manuscript: perhaps it might have been a better story if he had left much of this material in. Having only recently seen the film for the first time, I found it wholly unremarkable, though I can see now how Truffaut got to a perception of destructive gender conflict we see, for example, in Day for Night. Thanks again for a highly voluble production.