Jules and Jim

Composite Score: 87.23

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre, Vanna Urbino, Serge Rezvani, Anny Nelsen, Sabine Haudepin, Marie Dubois, and Michel Subor

Director: François Truffaut

Writers: François Truffaut and Jean Gruault

Genres: Drama, Romance

MPAA Rating: Not Rated

Box Office: $487,117 worldwide

My take on Watching This Film:

                Jules and Jim is François Truffaut’s film about a love triangle between an aspiring Austrian writer, his French best friend, and the woman with whom both fall in love. The film stars Oskar Werner and Henri Serre as the titular friends and Jeanne Moreau as their mutual love interest, Catherine. The film follows the three from the inception of their friendship in the early 1900s, through World War I, when Jules and Jim are drafted to opposite sides of the war, and eventually to their adult lives in the 1920s and 30s and the ongoing complications of their unique relationships with one another. The film is an icon of the French New Wave movement, complete with the quintessential New Wave leading lady in Moreau and a frantic style that helps the film feel fresh even as it examines events set decades prior. It presents us with three complex and complete characters in Jules, Jim, and Catherine, each with their own virtues and vices, all of whom feel incredibly grounded in reality even as the bounds of their relationships between and amongst each other strains credulity for a more traditional audience. Both Werner and Serre play their characters well, lending empathy to the film’s titular characters and drawing the audience into their stories well. Nevertheless, it is Jeanne Moreau as Catherine who carries the film. Her absence is noted in the rare occasions that she’s not on screen, just as her character’s absence is noted in the lives of those around her. It’s a fantastic performance that is complex, frustrating, lovable, spiteful, fun, and manic all rolled together into a single character that is far closer to reality than most leading ladies of the day and even those of today. She avoids making the character overtly melodramatic and never stands out or feels out of place in the world of the film. The treatment of Catherine as a character is also what helps the film to stand out. While the friendship between Jules and Jim serves as the framework for the film, it is Catherine and her own life that puts flesh on those bones, and she’s never treated by the story as a true villain as could easily be the case with the type of character that she’s playing. Instead, we usually view her with sympathy if not empathy as her own life, much of it outside her control, drives her to become the unwilling tormentor of these two best friends. While I don’t personally love the way that the film wraps up because it feels inauthentic to the otherwise fairly progressive approach to the characters and the ideas that they represent, I do appreciate the film as a whole and really enjoy it for what it has done for cinema as one of the high points of the French New Wave. It is a film carried by its performances and style, especially the showing from Jeanne Moreau, which makes it an easy film to enjoy and appreciate, definitely deserving of consideration among the greats. The ending may or may not work for all audience members, but the film as a whole is excellent and worth checking out at least once if you are a lover of cinema. You can currently find this film streaming on Max and the Criterion Channel if you’d like to check it out for yourself.