Jules and Jim

Directed by: François Truffaut - 1 hour, 46 minutes - 1962 - France - B&W - Blu-ray - 2.35:1
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre, Vanna Urbino, Bassiak

“Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules and Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession. The legendary François Truffaut directs, and Jeanne Moreau stars as the alluring and willful Catherine, whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema’s most captivating romantic triangles. An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, Jules and Jim was a worldwide smash in 1962 and remains every bit as audacious and entrancing today.” (Criterion.com)

Jules and Jim is, along with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, one of the key films of the French New Wave. Truffaut and his peers were critics for the Cahiers du Cinema journal for the decade previous, and brought with them an encyclopedic knowledge of film and a willingness to experiment when they began making their own films. Jules and Jim has the energy of a youthful director who’d been saving up ideas and dying to try them out on-screen, but is grounded in the love story (really, stories) taken from Henri-Pierre Roché’s autobiographical novel. The film also has a number of parallels with Colonel Blimp, including the love triangle and the friends fighting on opposite sides of the first World War, terrified they will meet in combat.

Trailer
IMDB page
Roger Ebert Great Movies review (4/4 stars) - “There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time.”
John Powers essay - “Almost every scene is shot through with such casual stylistic brilliance. Yet what audiences have always loved about this movie isn’t simply its technical brio but its emotional warmth, its embrace of a world in which tragedy is forever playing hopscotch with farce.”