Customer Reviews

Jules and Jim

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The Criterion edition is a huge improvement over the Fox Lorber version. The picture quality is vastly better, with far less grain and markedly finer resolution; the subtitles are also positioned less obtrusively. I was disturbed by another reviewer's claim that the picture 'shook' - there was no shaking at all with my copy. The transfer was supervised and approved by the director of photography for the film, Raoul Coutard, so it is hardly surprising that it looks good; in some of the darker scenes there is some flickering, but this is hardly a major issue. I actually found the Fox Lorber print difficult and annoying to watch, while the Criterion is completely enjoyable, in fact better than prints I've seen at the cinema.
*
Having seen the film itself several times, I have to admit that on first viewing its great reputation was a bit baffling. My own expectations had been defeated, as I was expecting a film which was at core 'realist'. On subsequent viewings, it became much more rewarding, especially on encountering the idea that it is more a 'fairy tale' or, at least, a fable. When I stopped thinking of the film as 'prose' and allowed it to be appreciated as 'poetry', its spirit suddenly made sense. The style is truly original, and so inevitably preconceived expectations will be disappointed.
*
There is a pervasive light-hearted energy to the film, embodied in all aspects of its making, from the dancing camerawork, to the deft editing and playful performances. And this provides a poignant contrast to the themes explored, which deal with denser issues of commitment and allegiance. The characters might well be taken as representing larger ideas, such as national identity, but any symbolism is gestural and open-ended, so the film never feels preachy.
*
The extras provided are extensive and give great insight into the surprising background of the film - it is based on a book which in turn is a distanced recollection of the author's experience - so, in a sense, this is a 'true' story - although its tone is, as Truffaut puts it in an interview, more like a nostalgic traipsing through an old photo album.
*
A truly beautiful film, and the Criterion edition does it excellent service.

I was 12 when I saw this on Public television on a Friday night-I sat alone in the TV room in our basement, away from the perpetual chaos of my home life upstairs, and watched it, transfixed. It completely changed how I looked at film, love and just about everything else. It also made me fall in love with everything French-a love affair that has lasted 40 years. I have taken countless people to see this film in art houses and I have bought and given away a few DVDs as well.

Truffaut's storytelling is crisp and clear, and the three actors are sublime. This is a triumph of the spirit and a deeply romantic film. C'est la vie magnifique.

Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim was a very popular art-house movie in the early sixties. The black and white French (English subtitled) film follows the friendship of two college students in bohemian Paris beginning in 1912. They meet Catherine, a free spirit who loves to shock people as much as she enjoys both men's love. She marries Jules, but is not satisfied. They reunite with Jim and continue their love triangle.

Jeanne Moreau's Catherine is eternally alluring, selfish, manipulating, and cruel. She is perfect as the siren who plays with men as a cat plays with a mouse. Oscar Werner gives a sympathetic performance as the idealistic and vulnerable Jules, who goes from carefree youth to melancholy middle-age. Henri Serre is well-cast as Jim, more quiet and introspective, yet still helplessly drawn to the enigmatic Catherine.

This is the kind of movie one admires more each time you see it. At first, you are dependent on the subtitles; later you just enjoy the flow of scenes, the gradual change in mood from youthful exuberance to subdued acceptance, and then the stark and tragic, yet inevitable, conclusion. If you like character-driven stories about unconventional people, you'll enjoy Jules and Jim.

"A director only makes one film in his life, others are just replicas of this (extracted)" so said François Truffaut. Jules and Jim is "the" François Truffaut's movie.

A classic film in its own right, the film shines until now since it is released almost 40 years ago. In the film history of New Wave, Jules and Jim is a milestone. A follower of Jean Renior and Alfred Hitchcock, François combines mise-en-secne with featured story flawlessly and creates powerful images which aim at developing characters' in-depth psychological changes and multi-facets.

The 60s are the golden era of movies in which you read movies like books. You read the movies in a philosophical way. People talk and talk about the movies and never get tired of them. "Jules and Jim" is one of these films.

"Jules and Jim" is an important movie of François Truffaut in that it is his first featured film that can achieve commercial success with the French critics. This love story portrays a love-triangle among two men and a woman. Light and pessimistic, the film conveys a sense of defeatism and existentialism in the French society overshadowed by the imminent First World War. Catherine (played by Jeanne Moreau) is a manipulative and luring woman. She represents the object of desire of man that a man could never expect her next move. Jules (Oskar Werner) falls into her trap. Worse still, he married this woman who, deep inside her heart, doesn't know who she loves (or nobody actually).

Technically, the film exhibits the theory of mise-en-scene to the fullest in which French film theorist Andre Bazin has long been advocating, who developed his thesis from Jean Renoir's movies. Story is told by series of movie cuts and in a symbolic way. Narration alongside the moving of the story keeps the movie fast paced.

Woman is not to be trusted, love is blind and random, man is a tragic/ pathetic creature. Intricate, rich, thought-provoking and affectionate story, "Jules and Jim" is one of the greatest movie of all time. François proved to be a gifted, talented and innovative movie director. Any moviegoers and students should watch this movie at least once, if not several for the life to come.

I had to watch this movie for French class (sans subtitles). By the time this section was over, I had seen the movie seven times and practically knew the whole thing by heart. But rather than getting sick of it, I loved the movie more and more with each viewing. I've even tried to find the soundtrack (of which it is impossible to do so!) The reason I loved this film so much wasn't for its storyline (which is the same old two guys, one woman), but for its enchanting music, wonderful acting, and overall great filming techniques.

If you do watch it, do not watch the pan and scan version (you miss sooooo much of the films magic!) I highly recommend this film.

Criterion made a blunder on their DVD of "Jules and Jim." There is a sequence in which left and right are reversed. The reversal does not occur on the Fox/Lorber version. At about 56'14" the movie cuts to a shot of Jules and Jim sitting on a meadow. As we look at the frame, Jim is on the left, Jules to the right, and there is a little bridge to the left of the frame. Albert walks up to them and sits to the left of Jim (as we look at the frame). Both Criterion and Fox are the same here. The shot continues with Jim telling a war story. At 58'56" cut to Catherine in the window. On Criterion, the window is on the left, while on Fox it's on the right. It's hard to know which is correct, but one of them is reversed! At 58'59" cut back to Albert, Jim, and Jules sitting on the meadow. On Criterion their order is now reversed, with Jules on the left of the trio and Jim on the right. Fox has to original, correct order. Note also that the Criterion truncates Werner in the middle of his face, while Fox has all of him. Criterion has clearly reversed the shot! At 59'01" cut to Moreau in the window. Again Criterion has Moreau/window on the left, while it's still on the right on Fox. At 59'04" Albert walks from the meadow over the little bridge and then to the house. On Criterion, Jules is still sitting to the left of Jim (left and right still reversed), and the little bridge is now on the right of the frame, clearly reversed! Fox has the correct orientation (Jules to the right, bridge to the left).

Also, the cropping on Criterion is much worse on Criterion than Fox on the left and right. You can see this in the meadow scene - Fox has more space to the left and right of the trio as they sit in the meadow. Further, the Criterion suffers from a problem that exists on so many Criterion DVDs, namely that the black levels fluctuate. Take a look at the night scene between Catherine and Jim around 1hr. 05' The Fox does not have this problem. The Criterion has a very clean look with less damage than the Fox, but to my taste the Criterion is a little too light in contrast. Of course, Coutard should know - but then again, he should be able to tell left from right!

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 showing that elusive rapport, 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 voiceover 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.

I saw this film when it first came out in 1963 - I was 19 years old and very impressionable. I don't remember any scandal about it at the time, and it wasn't a popular film, was shown only at college art film houses. The vaguely homoerotic aspect of the film was a bit troubling, more so than the menage a trois, but Jeanne Moreau was so obviously a beautiful and sexually desirable woman that she neutralized that aspect of the story. The ending was shocking, made more so by the contrast with the enchanting Moreau singing "Le Tourbillon de la Vie". (She has several CD's listed on Amazon on which this song appears. Also, the written lyrics [in french] are available at www.paroles.net/chansons/30790.htm. The english translation in the subtitles is pretty lame.)

Seeing the film in later years, with more life experience and fewer raw emotions of my own to deal with, I am more aware of the quality of the acting and of Truffaut's skill as a director, which brought the film to life in the first place. Truffaut did things that no one had done before and brought a freshness to movies that made you feel as though you were seeing things for the first time.

Catherine's mental illness is far more obvious to me now, especially toward the end when she threatens to shoot Jim and then later succeeds in taking him with her in a murder-suicide. But it's present earlier in the film, with her impulsiveness and lack of regard for other people, and in the scene with the "vitriol - for lying eyes". Vitriol is hydrochloric acid - judging by the syrupy flow and the way it burned in the sink I'm sure they used the real thing in the scene. Truffaut, like the French in general, has a tendency to romanticize mental illness, but Katherine's symptoms and destructiveness are quite vivid. She is anything but the "life-force" the narrator calls her - she uses her sexuality destructively, searching for love that she can never sustain. However, Truffaut's art is such that Catherine's diagnosability does not detract from the fascination of the story. The men are besotted with her. We want them to run from Catherine as fast as they can, at the same time that we understand the power she has over them.

The subtitles in the Fox-Lorber DVD version are much easier to read than those of the old VHS version, but they are inaccurate at times. For example, they translate Catherine's sarcastic "mon Dieu, mon Dieu" in her translation into French of Jules' ironic German quotation from Goethe into "heavenly" rather than "my god, my god", which would have been much more effective, as well as more accurate. I know, I know, this is nit-picking, and translation is hard, and I could always turn the sub-titles off, but still these are supposed to be "new and improved" sub-titles, and they could have been done better.

The audio commentary by Glenn Kenny is surprisingly good, adding to the experience by showing HOW Truffaut achieved the effects he was looking for, and WHY they work. (But he makes at least one error in his french: "tourbillon" is a masculine word, taking "le" rather than "la".) Kenny informs us that some time after the film was released Truffaut received a letter from the woman after whom Catherine was modeled. She was 75 years old, had been afraid to see the film, but said that she finally forced herself to go, and had a wonderful time. She told Truffaut that somehow, transmuted through the novel and then into the film, he had recreated exactly the feeling and atmosphere of those days and the relationship of the three friends. She was still alive and not locked up in a lunatic asylum, so the movie may have exaggerated a few aspects of the story in the interest of art. (Her real name was Helen Hessel. She was a German painter, and her diary has been published [in french only, so far as I know] under the title "Journal d'Helene".)

"Jules et Jim" is one of my favorite films, and I enjoy it more each time I see it. But it's a love story made for adults about adults. The characters speak a foreign language and live in another time and place, so it's not to everyone's taste. I think it's a crime that young people would be forced to watch it in school for academic credit and therefore hate it. Truffaut was a compassionate and idealistic man and I'm sure he would roll over in his grave if he knew that was happening. It's the last thing he would have wanted.

Other than seeing him in Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, I have never been much acquainted with the films of much-acclaimed French New Wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut. Recently, though, I decided to try one of his most famous films, JULES AND JIM, and, for the most part, I was not disappointed by it. Having seen Jean-Luc Godard's seminal BREATHLESS just recently on DVD, I was able to appreciate some of the similarities in style between the two films. The first half of JULES AND JIM, especially, is full of technical wizardry: Truffaut not only uses Godard's pioneering jump-cut technique, but also uses the occasional freeze fame to emphasize particular small moments (like Jeanne Moreau's facial expressions at one point), plays with his film's aspect ratio (filmed in 2.35:1 widescreen Franscope by Raoul Coutard, who also did similarly distinguished work in BREATHLESS) and even interspersing WWI newsreel footage into the film, in the manner of Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. But, as with all great filmmakers, all of this technique is not merely the empty stylings of a virtuoso visual artist. Not only does the technique bring a fascinating alive-ness to the picture; it emphasizes the joy in the lives of the three main characters before WWI and its sad aftermath set in.

Truffaut's characters are also fascinating to watch, their situations equally so. Here is a romantic triangle like no other I've ever seen, but the focus isn't necessarily on the two men who love the same woman. As the Amazon.com editorial review suggests, the film may be named after its two main male characters, but it really belongs to Catherine, the self-proclaimed "free spirit" female who is loved by almost every man she meets and yet never feels the need to settle with just one. She is a powerful and fascinatingly enigmatic character, indeed "ultimately unknowable." Yet what spirit we notice when we first see her onscreen! Who wouldn't be resisted by her adventurousness and sheer energy at first, especially the way Jeanne Moreau irresistibly plays her? And then we see how manipulative and restless she can really be, and we start to feel a little sympathy toward the gentle man who married her, Jules: this is perhaps the first woman he has truly admired and loved, and now that he has gotten her, he desperately wants to hold on to her, even going so far as to put up with her cheating ways. Jim, of course, feels a bit of jealousy when Jules marries her, but he keeps it to himself, as a good friend must...until Jules allows him to carry on an affair with her. Even then, though, she becomes unhappy with Jim when she cannot conceive of a child. All of these threads converge into an ending that is both shockingly sudden and lyrically poetic; you'll understand Jules' feeling of "relief" after the film is over, and perhaps you'll likely echo it yourself, after having watched these characters live the way they have.

The central performances are all first-rate. Oskar Werner and Henri Serre as Jules and Jim both exhibit convincing chemistry at the beginning of the film: you can tell they've been good friends for a long time. As the film progresses, though, Werner truly stands out as the long-suffering Jules: he draws you into his ambivalent, complicated feelings toward Catherine, and easily earns some audience sympathy. And Jeanne Moreau truly brings Catherine, the real protagonist of the film, to vivid life. She is always convincingly in character, and never makes Catherine's actions feel lightweight or inconsequential, like some other less-skilled movie stars might do.

I found the narration of the movie kind of a distraction at times. Voice-over narration can be convincing in some movies (the recent SEABISCUIT used it quite effectively, I think), but in JULES AND JIM I find it a bit too explanatory of characters' emotions, too much of a narrative shortcut---in short, perhaps a bit of laziness on Truffaut's part. If less was merely explained and more was suggested by visual means, the film might seem more like a real film, less like a filmed novel, with passages being quoted from it verbatim.

In the end, though, that blemish is a comparatively small one, one that doesn't diminish the lyricism and beauty of this film significantly. JULES AND JIM remains a magnificent achievement from the French New Wave, a fascinating, emotionally complex, and above all human film about a woman whose attempts at being in control of her life slowly takes its toll on the lives of the two others who love her so. Highly recommended.

Five or six years before the " Peace and Love " movement that erupted in the United States and shocked a prude nation, French director François Truffaut, in his third movie, JULES & JIM, dared to film a love story between one woman and two men. And there was no guilt in sight ! Jeanne Moreau's love for Oskar Werner and Henri Serre was as innocent as the beautiful song she sang in the movie.

Fançois Truffaut must absolutely be rediscovered one of these days because all the fuss made about his New Wave companion, Jean-Luc Godard, has hidden the fact that his filmography is one of the more personal and interesting of the second part of the XXth century.

For once, Winstar has put a lot of goodies in this DVD. A commentary, a dozen trailers of other Truffaut's movies, filmographies and a tribute to Jeanne Moreau (in fact, a few scenes put one after the other while Jeanne is singing the well-known song of JULES & JIM).

Images and sound are average (there is alas ! only one Criterion...) but imperfections disappear behind the fulgurant modernity of this 1961 movie.

A DVD for your library.