Jules et Jim (French, 1962)
- condiscoacademy
- Oct 9, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 6
Jules et Jim, directed by François Truffaut traces the evolution of an unconventional love triangle involving Jules (played by Oscar Werner), Jim (played by Henri Serre) and Catherine (played by Jeanne Moreau).
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The plot
The film's narrative arc can be divided into three phases:
Phase 1
This phase, set in France, begins in 1912 and extends up to the end of the first world war. Jules is an Austrian expat living in Paris, where he meets the Frenchman Jim and the two men become bosom friends. Together they chase Parisian girls but eventually, both men fall in love with Catherine. Jules and Catherine start dating, and while Jim is attracted to her, he makes no overtures in deference to his friend. Jim starts dating Gilberta (played by Vanna Urbino), whom he treats as a distant consolation prize.
This phase is a careless time in the lives of these three young adults, who hang out together, enjoying the cultural life of Paris and the beauty of the French countryside. This bohemian existence comes to an end when Jules and Jim join their respective national armies following the breakout of the war. Jules and Catherine also get married at this time. Since Austria and France fought on opposite sides, the two friends are concerned that they may end up killing each other in the battlefield, but mercifully, both survive. During the war, on one of Jules' home visits, Catherine gets pregnant.
Phase 2
The second phase of the film, which lasts for a month is set by the Rhine river in Austria, where Jules and Catherine are living with their daughter Sabine (played by Sabine Haudepin) in a chalet. The war has ended and Jim, who is working for a Paris based newspaper, visits the couple and finds that the marriage is on the verge of collapse. Catherine is very temperamental and has had several affairs. She is contemplating leaving Jules to marry Albert (played by Serge Rezvani), a mutual friend from Paris, who is currently convalescing from a war injury in the neighboring town.
Not content with her power over Jules and Albert, Catherine starts a relationship with Jim, who moves in with the couple at their chalet at her invitation. Jules would prefer that Catherine ends up with Jim because in that scenario, he would still get to see her. After a month with the couple, Jim returns to Paris, leaving Catherine as his fiancé under Jules' care.
Phase 3
The third phase of the film is split between Austria and Paris. Jim has the good sense to realize that his life with Catherine will not be a happy one. Hence, he finds excuses to delay his return to Austria and continues with his live-in relationship with Gilberta in Paris. But eventually, his intense attraction for her sends him back to the chalet by the Rhine. When their attempt to conceive a baby does not succeed, Catherine manufactures a quarrel with Jim and asks him to return to Gilberta. Eventually, Jules and Catherine move to Paris, where she pursues him again, this time with a disastrous outcome.
Observations
As time goes by
Jules et Jim begins where the coming of age drama ends. As young adults, we have fuzzy but optimistic conceptions of what our career, romantic lives and lifestyle would be. The part of the film that is set prior to the onset of the first world war relates to this hopeful phase of the lives of the three protagonists. The scene where the three race each other on a bridge is a visually powerful emblem of youth's giddiness.
Eventually, as we grow older, we discover that the days are long but the years are short. We experience many disappointments and our victories do not bring us the joy we expected from them. As things turn out, the war is not only an inflection point for the world but also for the lives of Jules, Jim and Catherine. After the war, each of the three experience the inevitable disappointments that characterize life.
Jules finds that the woman he coveted and got, wants to leave him. Meanwhile, Jim discovers that his longest lasting relationship with a woman is what we today characterize as a friends with benefits setup. In fact, early on in their relationship, Jim reminds Gilberta of their agreement to not expect much from him. Little did he know that he would be shacking up with her in a state of perpetual impermanence. Finally, Catherine finds herself to be a reluctant housewife and mother.
The central theme of Jules et Jim is thus fairly simple. It depicts the disappointing arc of an adult life.
Free spirit
While the film is named after the two men, Catherine is the central character. She is a free spirit. She does what she wants, unconstrained by the opinion of others. While Catherine does not speak the language of feminism, a couple of memorable scenes hint at the constraints she feels as a woman. The first time the three go out, Catherine dresses up as a man and her costume is convincing enough for a stranger to address her with a male salutation. In another incident, Jules and Jim are having a spirited discussion on what is expected from a "good woman", a topic triggered by the play the three had just seen. Catherine does not participate in the discussion but jumps into the Seine river at 2 AM, shortly after listening to the patriarchal views of Jules. Somewhat ironically, later as Catherine's husband, Jules behaves in manner that is opposite of the misogynistic views he was espousing.
The tragedy is that while Catherine displays the rare gift of asserting her freedom without caring for social censure, she is a slave to the thoughts arising in her mind. In Catherine's case, she is always dissatisfied and looking for succor in the romantic attention of suitors. But in the end, no amount of attention from Jules, Jim and Albert is sufficient. Feeling the edge of the present moment is the human condition. That is the reason we keep checking our phones or go for that glass of wine. In Catherine's case, her actions are more extreme. She wishes to be the heroine of a romance novel, burning letters of past lovers and carrying sulfuric acid in a bottle to protect herself from undesirable men. Yet, the daily flow of life is full of tedium for most of us. As the writer Annie Dillard says "how we spend our days is how we spend our life". Catherine spends her days looking for the next dramatic high and life, thus, passes her by.
It is Jim who understands the flaw in Catherine's personality early on. When Jules informs Jim of his intention to marry Catherine, Jim notes she will be never be happy and she is not made for a husband. Yet sexual desire is such a powerful force that Jim is later willing to leave Gilberta and marry Catherine.
The counterfactual
What would Catherine's life be had she not married Jules? On the verge of saying yes to Jules' proposal, Catherine asks Jim to meet her at a café. Jim waits for her but Catherine arrives so late that he has already left by then. The audience can infer that she intended to seek Jim's opinion about the marriage. The missed meeting at the café eventually takes place in the forest outside the married couple's chalet by the Rhine, where Catherine and Jim talk candidly about the failing marriage.
Perhaps, had the conversation occurred at the café, Catherine would not have married Jules. Yet, she would not have been happy regardless of whom she married or whether she married at all. As we watch her experience the existential version of buyer's remorse , we realize the futility of her counterfactuals. Yet, what is easy to discern in others is hard to apply to our own selves. Many of us nurture a counterfactual life narrative that we mourn and regret the actions that prevented the fruition of that life.
Letters
After Jim returns to Paris, Catherine insists that they communicate via letters instead of the phone. In the modern world, most of our communication is either synchronous (example, phone call) or near synchronous (example, texting). In letter writing, the lag with which recipient received letters meant that their content was less immediate. One was less likely to write messages about the lousy coffee that you just had or the long line at the grocery store. Given the limitations of space, one was more selective in choosing the topics to include. But while letters were more thoughtful than electronic communication, the asynchronous nature of the communication could cause misunderstanding between the correspondents. This is what occurs when Jim and Catherine communicate via letters. By the time Catherine writes an angry response to an older letter, Jim has already sent a conciliatory letter.
The whimsical narrator
The director chooses the device of a narrator (voice of Michael Subor) whose voiceover adds momentum to the film's pace. Apart from providing crucial information (e.g., Jules and Jim were mobilized for the war), he also keeps dropping whimsical details. For instance, when Jules chalks a sketch of a woman on a table in a bar, the narrator mentions that Jim wants to buy the table but the bar owner would only sell if Jim bought all the twelve tables in his establishment! Another detail shared is that Jules and Jim had identical outfits made for themselves while visiting an open air art museum.
The daily life
While Jules et Jim is not a period film in the traditional sense, the glimpses it provides into the daily lives of people during the time period covered, add enormously to its charm.
Despite the absence of modern technology, entertainment in this era bore a striking resemblance to today, with people frequenting bars, cafés, theaters, and museums. However, these activities were inherently more social, as people were not glued to screens. In the café where Jim and Catherine meet, it’s notable that everyone is drinking wine at 7 PM instead of coffee.
Gyms, though devoid of modern equipment like treadmills and weight machines, still offered showers, and the focus was on interactive activities like boxing and fencing. Jules’s use of an hourglass to keep track of time, whether for dressing up for the theater or heading to bed, highlights a more analog approach to daily routines.
The differences extend to personal habits and social interactions. Jules carries physical photographs of Austrian girls in his pocket, a striking contrast to today’s smartphone photo sharing. Similarly, when the two visit Albert's flat in Paris, they watch a slideshow on a projector, underlining the slower, more deliberate pace of media consumption at the time. Paris itself, as seen in documentary footage, still relied on horse-drawn carriages for transportation, a quaint reminder of the era's blend of old and new.
Fashion and social customs also reflect the period’s elegance and formality. Jim, for instance, carries a walking stick as an accessory when visiting Catherine at the café, and the men often wear cravats, hats, and ties—items not casually worn today but still a mark of European elegance. In one scene, Jim even asks Jules to change his hat before they go out, a sartorial detail that might seem trivial now but was significant then.
The film also depicts the early waves of sexual liberation in Paris, even before World War I. A girl named Teresa, who spends the night with Jules, casually leaves with another man she meets at a café the next morning. This sense of freedom and the complexities of relationships are humorously underscored when, years later, Jim encounters Teresa again, only to be regaled with the dramatic saga of her love life, culminating in her marriage to an undertaker.
These snapshots collectively paint a vivid picture of a time when life was both remarkably different and surprisingly familiar.
When Jules et Jim was released in 1962, it inspired an angry response from the Catholic church and was even banned for a while in Italy. Today, we would find this film tame as there is no sex and nudity. More importantly, marriage is not idealized today and hence, the film does not offend our moral sensibilities.
Like Truffaut's 400 Blows, the film becomes more enjoyable with every viewing because of the loving detail with which the director sketches out every scene. The beautiful soundtrack (composed by Georges Delerue), the interspersed documentary footage of Paris and the war, and the idyllic time spent by the characters in the great outdoors, add to the viewing pleasure.
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