Movies - Jules et Jim

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	Movies - Jules et Jim

Jules et Jim is a 1961 film by François Truffaut based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché.

Truffaut described the book as 'a perfect hymn to love and perhaps to life' . He came across it during the mid 1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books in Paris and later befriended the elderly author who approved of the young director's attempt to translate the words on the page into celluloid images.

Synopsis

The film is set before, during and after the First World War in several different parts of France and Germany. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy writer from Austria who makes friends with the more extroverted Jim (Henri Serre). They share an interest in the world of the arts and the Bohemian life. After encounters with several women, they encounter the free-spirited, capricious Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) and both men are affected by her presence and her attitude towards life. After the separation that occurs during the war, Jules and Catherine marry and have a daughter. They invite Jim to visit, and later stay, with them. Their ménage à trois becomes a love triangle which leads, ultimately, to tragedy.

Style

One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules et Jim is an inventive encyclopaedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was the virtuoso Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight photographic equipment to create an extremely fluid and distinctive camera style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles. The evocative musical score is by Georges Delerue and one song, Le Tourbillon (The Whirlwind) summed up the turbulence of the lives of the three main characters, becoming a popular hit. The dialogue is predominantly in French, with occasional lines in English and German.

Influence

Quentin Tarantino references this work in his film Pulp Fiction
. A sequence from it appears briefly in a cinema scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie
. It is also referenced in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky
.

The song 'When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe' by The Divine Comedy references Jules et Jim in the lines "Jeanne can't choose between the two / 'Cos Jules is hip and Jim is cool / And so they live together".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Jules et Jim ]

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