François Truffaut
Jules e Jim

"It is a dream: we all suffer from the transient aspects of our loves, and this film made us dream of eternal loves. That's all": these are the words with which François Truffaut commented, a few years after its release, on his third feature film Jules and Jim (1961). Words that, re-read today, seem as incisive as they are elusive.

Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, the film is another testament to the eclecticism of the young Parisian director, who, in this work, tried to blend the stylistic elements of the nouvelle vague with the period film, attempting a synthesis of two opposing styles and languages: just as the first invited directors to represent the present, the here and now, daily life and what could be told as witnesses, involved parties, and observers, if not protagonists, the second distracted the viewer by bringing them to a past filled with ideals that counterpoint a present to be forgotten for a couple of hours.

For Truffaut, the attempt was a challenge and, at the same time, a way to vary on themes that had become dear to him both from a formal and content perspective.

In form, the technical challenge was to represent the past and the early 20th century of the Belle Époque and the post-war period in discontinuity with previous works, so infused with the mood of Paris in the late '50s, and with characters that somehow reflected the present of the Author. Making a film as if it were indeed the early 1900s required a revision of the style of previous films, here renewed both by the use of voice-over narration and the omniscient storyteller-writer, as well as by filming and photographic techniques that, at times, seem sped up almost to the point of imitating the silent cinema of the early century, in the footsteps of Lumiere and Chaplin.

In essence, it was instead a personal search for lost time - a nod to Proust because the social milieu described by Proust was one of the film's inspiring canons - an attempt to rediscover, in the past, the immutable eternity of relationships and feelings, tracing an immediate bridge between the buried memories of Jules and Jim and the life of the director, as well as the audience: the story of two friends and their loves as a paradigm of a life lived with intensity, living a daily life filled with sports, art, and culture.

A story of an atypical triangle, in which two friends love, at different times and in different ways, the same woman, loved back in different ways without the will to definitively choose one or the other, without the claim that love for one becomes necessary pain for the others, "Jules and Jim" was seen by some as the story of intellectual, emotional, and sexual libertinism, as well as a "hymn" to limitless love and the emancipation of men and women from the pre-packaged schemes of tradition.

There is no doubt that, immediately and for several years after its release, this was one of the meanings of the film, perhaps the most immediate and easily perceived by the public and critics in years when most French intellectuals were preparing the ground for the Parisian '68 with existentialism, deconstructionism, and language critique.

Nothing could be further from the Sorbonne and the ferment of the Latin Quarter for Truffaut, however, who, even in this film, declaring that he was simply dealing with love, and nothing else, represents the life of a couple and three couples together: first outlining the masculine friendship between Jules and Jim in the gyms and ateliers of early-century Paris, then describing the irruption of the young Catherine, and then, through synthesis and ellipses following the passing years, the apparent serenity of the family, its disintegration, and attempts to recompose bonds.

A Truffaut "immoral", by the standards of the time, that masks, upon closer inspection, the moralism of the poet: more than the story of a triangle, as it has been labeled in an attempt to trivialize its message, "Jules and Jim" stages a conflict between real life - the bourgeois interiors, the intimate yet ordinary country house chosen by Jules and Catherine as a love nest - and the romantic quest for absolute sentiment, represented by Catherine in men, and by the very idea of sentiment as an ideal of possible life in women.

In certain ways, while Truffaut searches in time, and through time, the flow and transformations of love, the film demonstrates how people can survive wars, can paradoxically never age, but do not as easily survive the search for an absolute, be it in the well-defined shape of a woman, or formless and unknowable: modern and traditional at the same time, the director revisits the theme of eros and thanatos on multiple levels, given that every type of love, in the dimension of friendship, love for children or a partner, love for someone who disrupts a couple's life, collides with inevitable and therefore tragic defeat, whether it results from one's behavior or the very flow of events.

Much more mature than previous films in terms of content, and simply much more ambiguous than other works and thus open to different interpretations, the film does not yet seem entirely successful, despite the fame that accompanies it for decades, suffering more than any other of Truffaut's works from the effects of time.

The adaptation from a complex novel does not seem among the most successful, scattering the story into many different narrative frames that find unity and purpose only in the work's conclusion.

Probably, for Truffaut, cinema was the fastest means to communicate a layered set of opinions, easier to harmonize in critical essays or novels than in the brisk language of the '60s: not surprisingly, here the writer steals space from the director, making the film as dense in content as it is cumbersome in certain developments.

Nevertheless, the actors, always well-directed by the director, managed to overcome these limitations: with Oskar Werner and Henri Serre, capable of interpreting two figures suspended between vital impulses and passivity in the face of uncontrollable love, and above all a Jeanne Moreau capable of portraying the first great woman in Truffaut's cinema, in her enigmatic gaze, where it is not easy to distinguish the determination and fear of someone who dreams of eternal loves, and does not accept the fact that it is, indeed, "that's all".