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Jules and Jim

Screening: Monday 2 April, 6:30pm

Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, France 1962) [Jules et Jim]

In his book The Films of My Life, François Truffaut famously wrote that every movie ought to express "either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema." As for Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), every sprocket-hole and molecule of emulsion is filled to brimming with joy, joy, joy. Like no other movie I can recall, Jules makes an encyclopedic catalog of the ancient Greeks' notions of love: friendly love, parental love, romantic and sexual love, and, above all, love for the physical universe and for experience itself — the love that the Greeks considered to be the glue that binds the world.

After the entertaining hot-dogging of Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Truffaut brought his myriad gifts to bear on this story of a shifting love triangle involving Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), Jules (Oskar Werner), and Jim (Henri Serre). As an adolescent and open ménage à trois decays into Catherine's melancholy shuttling between Jules and Jim, suffused with a collective desire for children and an alternately attracted and repulsed view of monogamy, Truffaut and his scenarist Jean Gruault chart every recognizable permutation of love's outpour.

The movie perfectly charts each gradation of rampaging lust, heart-driven frolic, and drama-starved boredom, along with the gradual awareness of one's fundamental isolation — even in a room filled with one's beloved. And the chilling final voiceover has the unimpeachable finality of that brutal sentence that closes Madame Bovary. It is, quite simply, one of the wisest works about the human heart in all of cinema. (Matthew Wilder)

Written by Truffaut and Jean Grualt, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. Photographed by Raoul Coutard. With Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre, Vanna Urbino. (35mm, B&W, 99 mins, In French with English subtitles, R16)

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