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90 comments in total

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47 out of 56 people found the following comment useful :-
art isn't about "identification", 4 March 2005

Author: willtato from United States

Why do so many people need to "get into the characters" "care about the characters" "identify with the characters", to enjoy or appreciate a great film? I think it's a type of selfishness, as shallow as the urge to reject an outcome one doesn't like. Examples: "I know it's good; but the ending was too down" (Lolita), or a woman I once heard criticize Unbearable Lightness of Being because one of the main characters is a womanizer who doesn't repent or have justice rendered to him. Ironically, in Jules and Jim, we see a woman who is a "manizer" whom some viewers are appalled or put off by).

Jules and Jim features three characters whose unrealism is beyond question - Truffaut himself might comment on how Catherine fascinated the other two, but I doubt very much he would claim any of the three to be "realistic". I think the whole thing is a fable, and therefore the three are more like archetypes. The beauty isn't really the story, but HOW the story unfolds, and, most importantly how it is told VISUALLY: the breeziness interrupted by dramatic outbursts (flames, jumping into the river, death by drowning), the exploration of love as a fleeing of tediousness and predictability, the hinting (yes there is a type of love between Jules and Jim, though not a homo erotic one) that friendship is always deeper than romantic love, the beautiful flowing and editing of sequences, for example: where all three go bicycling in the country.

The duty of film is to tell a story in moving images, to take advantage of the things that specifically make cinema different from drama or literature - moving the spectator about in space and time, which cannot be done in any other art form in quite the same way. But nothing about this movie is conventional, and people looking for "resolution", or a someone getting their comeuppances, or even a character learning more about himself must look elsewhere for gratification.

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46 out of 57 people found the following comment useful :-
A breathless film about time., 12 July 2001

Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Time and revisionist critics have tried to tarnish the gleam of Truffaut's final masterpiece - citing its apparent misogyny and apoliticism; but for some of us, 'Jules et Jim' is the unforgettable film that opened the gates to both European film, and the great masters of American cinema like Hitchcock, Hawks and Ray.

'Jules et Jim' is, along with 'Citizen Kane', THE vindication of the pleasures of cinematic form: the first half especially, in its rush of narrative registers and technical exuberance, is unparalleled in modern film. This isn't mere trickery - the use of paintings, books, plays, dreams, conversations, documentary footage, etc., as well as the different ways of telling a story through film, all point to the movie's theme - how do you represent people and the world in art without destroying them? Or is art the only to save people and life from extinction?

The foregrounding of theatricality, acting, disguises, pseudonyms, games, works-within-the-work, all point to the high modernism in which the film is set, when the old certainties about identity and place were being destroyed by the Great War. In fact the film could be considered Cubist in the way it uses film form to splice up and rearrange images, space, characters, viewpoints.

Truffaut's film is a beautiful elegy about time: the historical time heading towards destruction in the shape of the Nazis, and the circular time of love, obsession and art. These times struggle in the film's structure, history zipping past years in the framing, Parisian sections, and days stretching out interminably in the central rural rondelay.

Far from being misogynistic, the film places Catherine's speech about 'grains of sand' at its philosophical heart. AND she's played by Jeanne Moreau, the most honest and human of all great actresses.

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99 out of 166 people found the following comment useful :-
No -- still not getting it., 5 August 2002
Author: Bobs-9 from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Whenever a commentator declares outright that a film is a complete waste of time and that nobody, BUT NOBODY, should ever watch it, I tend to peg that commentator as an opinionated ass. So I would never say that about a well-respected film like "Jules and Jim." But quite honestly, I can't warm up to it. I've watched it on more than one occasion over the years, and it never fails to put me to sleep at both ends of my anatomy. I've just viewed a DVD edition in which a film scholar clearly explains his views on the fascination of "Jules and Jim." But I still couldn't see why the relationship of these three tedious characters, discussed and analyzed in all its very tedious minutiae by those same characters and an off-screen narrator (also tedious), should interest me. It's certainly beloved by academic types (maybe for those very same characteristics?), and film critics eat it up like it has gravy on it. Like another commentator, I'm a bit puzzled by all the comments about its lyrical, lighthearted and idyllic qualities. I'm left with the impression of a rather dry, academic dissertation on the complexities of male-female relationships ca. 1961 (the 1910 setting seems to me immaterial to the script).

I can't help feeling that I'm missing something, and I'm not averse to French films, but they're usually older, pre-new-wave films, for example "Forbidden Games," "French Can-Can," or Pagnol's "Fanny" trilogy. I take it that the sentimentality of such films is one of the things new wave directors reacted against. If so, I can't jump on their bandwagon, try as I might. I've enjoyed some of Truffaut's work, but not this, I'm afraid.

To those who love and appreciate "Jules and Jim" -- have pleasure of it. I envy you for that, and maybe I'll try it again in a few years.

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42 out of 56 people found the following comment useful :-
Jules et Jim embodies the beauty of French cinema, 14 October 2000

Author: nicholas carlton (nmoc@globalnet.co.uk) from London, England

The French have a remarkable tendency of creating free-flowing, poetic movies that transport this particular art form into subtle, poignant flights of fancy and nowhere is this more evident than in Jules et Jim, which embodies the beauty of French cinema.

I believe that Truffaut is the most poetic filmmaker in cinematic history. Jules et Jim is his finest moment and, in the ever fluctuating relationships between the Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau characters, we are allowed to be taken along on a refreshing, beatific ride through the passionate simplicity of love and friendship.

The leisurely philosophical musings of the two men in Jules et Jim are counterbalanced by Moreau's bright, airy amorality. She brings about a radicalism and sense of unpredictability in the movie that is nonetheless charming and utterly innocent and benign. Moreau's instinctive will makes her out to be a selfish attention-seeker but without that this movie would not be so surprising and liberating. Truffaut's does not stick to a rigid narrative form, like many '50s and '60s French New Wave directors, and he allows the stream of consciousness dialogue and the ever-changing fortunes of Moreau's erratic relationships with the men to dictate the structure. Jules et Jim has a certain clarity of vision.

French love stories are often based upon dialogue that is rife with throwaway witticisms, perceptive trivial observations, and explosive utterances of love or despair, and Jules et Jim is no different. It can drift along tranquilly until a sudden unexpected change of mood occurs and everything is turned on its head. Moreau's leaping into the river after a civilised night out at the theatre is a delightfully liberating moment, utterly pointless yet still gleefully uninhibited. My finest memory is the heavenly ditty by Moreau which sums up both her and the movie's personality and atmosphere. So simple, so sublime, and always tugging away in the most sumptuous manner at the heartstrings. I don't think I have ever got that tune out of my head.

If you want to experience the sheer majesty of cinema, Jules et Jim just has to be seen. Not only is it bright and breezy but it has tragic moments of pathos as well. There is a surprise at every turn, almost always caused by the Moreau character, and such is the freedom of her spirit and the freedom of the movie's spirit, you can forgive her every action and fickle about-turns. There is no sense of permanence with her. Jules et Jim only confirms my belief that the French make cinema's greatest romances. Utterly natural, hardly ever contrived, and so cool and graceful.

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17 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
Movies don't get more beautiful than "Jules and Jim", 28 February 2000

Author: troy-32 from Chicago, Illinois

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I once read a review stating that the best time to see "Jules and Jim" is when you're in college. Well, I was lucky enough to see this movie when I was 22, and I have to agree completely with the observation. When you're in college and in your early twenties, life's caprices may never again seem so exhilirating and fresh. And that's what Francois Truffaut gets to do in "Jules and Jim". Everything that's vivid in life plays out here on the screen and Truffaut does it with so much feeling that it spins the movie into places where movies hardly ever go. The plot about Jules and Jim whose sweet, yet simple relationship is awakened into exciting, lesser known areas by Catherine gets it all. And because Truffaut's storytelling style is so unobscured with conventional plotting his treats are consistently fresh and leisurely and surprising. Isn't that the best thing a movie, or any other art form, can do for us? Most movies that are scaled big fail largely because the filmmakers are apt to outline their ideas and characterizations and turn around and do a filmization of these ideas. Unfortunately, this is what most people have come to look forward to in their moviegoing. At most, movies will shake us for the moment and leave us with a suspicion that we were played for emotional jerks. What Truffaut often did, and never more touchingly than in "Jules and Jim", was to let a scene happen that you might or might not later remember. But if you were affected by this movie the first time around, then you would always remember it in a way that made you feel happy and nostalgic. "Jules and Jim" has the ethereal quality of your most beloved dream that you can never return to. A measure of this film's uniqueness and influence is in how much movies since then have directly and indirectly tried at something similar. The menage a trois that seemed so irresistible in this 1961 French film made some people (including a lot of future filmmakers) so gaga that this beautiful concept of living life so fully as to become the essence of everything both civilized and uncivilized was infused with so much sentiment that lots of the romance in movies today is sickly with fake charm and self-conscious recklessness, even self-destruction. This has become such a pose that it has even found its place into the culture of beauty (e.g., Abercrombie & Fitch models, who are torturously postured to look carefree and beautiful and enviable). I am as in love with "Jules and Jim" as anybody, but I also understand the harm in allowing this kind of feeling to guide you. "Jules and Jim" is completely lacking in sentiment, and that's what makes it an original. And it gives it an edge. True to the movie, Oskar Werner provides a sweet masculine simplicity and Henri Serre has a stoic handsomeness - both in looks and demeanor. Both actors fill their roles well, but Jeanne Moreau is sensual and vibrant, and her Catherine is what makes "Jules and Jim" come alive. She is the one who functions on a purely emotional level, she is the one who can only react to her environment as opposed to functioning within it, she is both desperate and exhilirating, so much the embodiment of everything that makes life memorable and exciting that she could only be viewed up on a big screen. Maybe Catherine is one of the cinema's most selfish characters, but that selfishness is vivid and steeped in amorality, it doesn't make her unlikable, and the movie would fall apart if she were being judged, or were softened for an audience. Her selfishness can be charming, and she can live her life as she wants, which is honest, if nothing else. All of the movie's great scenes belong to her: playfully slapping Jules who is more interested in a cerebral chess game with his friend than in her charming observations, jumping into the Seine to demonstrate her feminine power, her lovely song, the scavenger hunt in the woods, her rattling off a wine list, and, my own favorite scene where they play "Village Idiot". It follows a slightly sobering scene where little Sabine is carrying wood, and it's an overwhelming sunburst of happy! It lasts for about 11 seconds, and its uninhibited, unashamed joy, with it's sweet, lovely, lighter-than-air music, leaves you as suddenly as it approached you.

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12 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Truffaut's Classic Relationship Triangle as Idiosyncratic, Disconcerting and Mesmerizing as Ever, 27 May 2006

Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

The enduring legacy around François Truffaut's emotionally turbulent 1962 film depends primarily on how compatible the three actors are in inhabiting the triangle at the core of the story adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché semi-autobiographical novel. And in fact, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and especially Jeanne Moreau provide superbly etched characterizations in one of the defining works of the French New Wave. Fortunately, the two-disc Criterion Collection DVD set provides an appropriately rich package for this classic, although the print transfer is frustratingly variable at times.

The story focuses on the friendship between two writers, an Austrian named Jules and a Frenchman named Jim, kindred spirits who enjoy a decadent lifestyle in pre-WWI Paris. Inspired by a statue of a woman's face with a most enigmatic smile, they agree that they are destined to fall in love with a woman with the same smile. Enter Catherine, as seductively capricious a free-spirit as ever there was in cinema, and the two men are instantly enamored. Jules is intent on marrying her, even though it's clear from the outset that she is not one who could commit for the long term. The war intercedes, and the two friends are fighting on opposite sides. After the war, Catherine, married to Jules and raising their young daughter, is emotionally dissatisfied and embarks on an affair with Jim. With Jules' blessing, things are idyllic for a while, but Jim proves too much the alpha male to defer to Catherine's whims, and the resulting imbalance leads to increasingly dramatic consequences.

In just his third film, Truffaut's trademark style emerges with fast cuts between scenes and naturalistic camera movements (courtesy of Raoul Coutard's fluid cinematography). Moreover, George Delerue's animated music score and Michel Subor's voice-over add to the evocative photo-album memory atmosphere. At times, the storyline feels a bit disjointed, but the fulsome performances more than compensate. Werner fully captures the internal struggle within Jules in attempting to reconcile his love for Catherine with her impossible demands on him. Serre has the comparatively more objective role but convincingly shows his character surrendering to the tangled situation. After her impressive turn as an obsessed adulterer in Louie Malle's "Elevator to the Gallows", Moreau solidifies her vaunted reputation here, conveying Catherine's petulance and unyielding passion in a vividly mercurial fashion.

The DVD extras are abundant starting with two commentary tracks. The first one, a more factual account of the production, was recorded in 1992 with Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, editor Claudine Bouche, co-screenwriter Jean Gruault, and scholar Annette Insdorf. The second, produced in 2000, is far better as it has Moreau sharing her personal recollections of the filming with Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana. Disc One also includes a brief 1966 interview with Truffaut discussing Roché and a 1985 featurette, "The Key to Jules and Jim", which contains interviews with the author's friends as they discuss the inspirations for the characters. Disc Two takes a broader look at Truffaut with five separate interviews with the director over the span of fifteen years, as well as insightful interviews with Coutard and co-screenwriter Jean Gruault.

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11 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Truffaut's "Hymn to Life", 25 May 2006

Author: marissabidilla from United States

Although "Jules and Jim" was made over 40 years ago and takes place 40 to 50 years before that, the amazing thing is that it barely seems to have dated. Because it focuses on the universal human relationships between its characters, rather than the specific time in which they live, it's the rare film set in the past that doesn't feel like a "period film." And, especially in the first half of the movie, Truffaut's New Wave techniques lend a remarkable energy and freshness.

The movie explores friendship and love among three semi-bohemian types: Parisian Jim (Henri Serre), Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner), and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the beautiful, free-spirited woman whom they both love. She's the most vibrant character in the movie, and impossible to pin down. It's never clear who she loves—she contradicts herself repeatedly, and perhaps loves no one but herself—or whether she's diabolical or simply misunderstood. Moreau nearly steals the movie, if not for the fact that the title reminds us to focus on the relationship between the two men, and that Serre and Werner give good performances too. Even if Jim and Jules aren't as mysterious as Catherine, they're complex and interesting characters in their own right.

The story plays out rather episodically, which means "Jules and Jim" is full of wonderful little moments, often involving the crazy things Catherine does. Some of my favorites include her dressing up as a man and racing Jules and Jim across a bridge; her jumping into the Seine in frustration; and her singing the movie's charming theme song, "The Whirlpool of Life." The episodes are linked together by surprisingly unobtrusive off-screen narration, which keeps the film moving along rather than slowing it down.

"Jules and Jim" does get a little tiresome toward the end, with Catherine continually vacillating between the men in her life, Jim vacillating between Catherine and his old girlfriend Gilberte, and Jules remaining loyally devoted to Catherine despite how foolish this may seem. However, the movie is redeemed by its tragic final scenes, which poignantly contrast with the carefree gaiety of the beginning. Jules, Jim, and Catherine are caught in a destructive spiral, tossed and defeated by the whirlpool of life. Still, the tone of the movie is gentle and human, not pessimistic. Truffaut considered "Jules and Jim" a "hymn to life," and it is most memorable as a vivid celebration of friendship and youthful possibility, even as it acknowledges how those things can sour.

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Whirlpool Of Days, 11 January 2002

Author: Cheetah-6 from Maui

Those with heavy sensibilities along the lines of conventional "morality" seem to have a hard time allowing themselves to enjoy this film for what it is: A beautiful visual poem about the passing of time and the progression and growth of an unusual friendship. This friendship may be unusual but feels completely natural and true. Jules and Jim if anything, exhibit great maturity in their relationship with each other and Catherine. It's refreshing to see a film dealing with a deep love, friendship and emotional bond between two males and a mutual love for a woman, without the usual competitiveness and controlling possessiveness that is the norm. Jules and Jim come off more as an enlightened pair. It seems understood among them there is no real belonging of one human being to another. Catherine's whims of the heart are discussed between them at every stage throughout the film and they are willing to accept them and love her for who she is as well as each other.

I do feel that this film lost it's pacing toward the end and seemed to speed up to conclusion. That being it's only flaw. Visually it is stunning. Francois Truffaut was a poet with the camera and his subtle nuances are captivating. The scenes of Jules, Jim and Catherine enjoying days together seem so natural and evoke the feel of wonderful days spent together among best friends that transported me back to days gone by.

"we met with a kiss/ a hit, then a miss/ and we parted/ we went our own ways/ in life's whirlpool of days/ around and around we go/ together bound/ together bound."

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13 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
You end up loving it!, 15 February 2005

Author: juanveliz7 from Tucumán, Argentina

This is the first movie by Truffault I've ever seen, and I have to say I'm now very intrigued in his other work...

"Jules et Jim" is the story of two friends who meet a very beautiful and strange woman who turns up to be a bit unstable...

It starts with how they all meet each other and end up together... I thought the beginning was pretty fast as many things happened and you just wonder if the whole movie will be like that. Also I thought I didn't care much for any character, but of course it was too quick to judge. There is also a narrator (throughout the movie) and at first you ask yourself if its really necessary...

Still, when I decided to go grab a snack, I realized I was so hooked by the story that I couldn't. The characters behaved like no other I've seen and you find yourself wanting two different things: for it to end and for it never to end.

The movie has it's many twists for those who like, even a laugh here and there, but if you see it as a whole is a very deep description of the relationship between the three main characters.

The end is somehow beautiful, maybe because is "fair", maybe because is "real", maybe because is "surreal", you'll just have to watch and find out...

Is one of those movies when after watching it you understand both sides: those who say it's overrated and those who claim it's a masterpiece... to me it was a one in a lifetime film experience

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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Unconventional Love Story, 18 January 2009

Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In 1912, in Paris, the French bon-vivant Jim (Henri Serre) meets the insecure German Jules (Oscar Werner) and they begin a great friendship. When they meet the fickle and independent French Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), they immediately fall in love for her. However the naiveness and fragility of Jules attract the amoral Catherine and she marries him. With the First World War, the best friends Jules and Jim are separated but after the war, they reunite in Jules cottage in Germany. Jim stays with Jules, Catherine and their daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin), and Jules tells his friend that he is living together with Catherine, but she has affairs with her lovers. When Catherine falls in love for Jim, Jules asks him to stay with her at his house. Along the years, Jules and Jim live a triangle of love of Catherine, but never affecting their friendship and respect.

"Jules et Jim" is one of the most (or probably the most) unconventional love stories of the cinema history. For a 1962 movie, the daring tale is absolutely ahead of time, with Jeanne Moreau performing a character that never lets her love becoming boring or monotonous, reviving and renewing her feelings and desires with lovers and then returning for her husband. The friendship of Jules and Jim is weird and also unusual, with memorable performances of Henri Serre and Oscar Werner. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Jules e Jim – Uma Mulher Para Dois" ("Jules e Jim – A Woman for Two")

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