In a sentenceShe cheats at the footbridge race and both men fall in love; that is the whole film in a minute
Paris, in the years before the First World War. Jules (Oskar Werner), a shy Austrian writer, and Jim (Henri Serre), a taller, easier Frenchman, meet at a party and become inseparable, sharing cafés, boxing lessons, poems and, without much jealousy, women. Jim keeps a steady mistress, Gilberte (Vanna Urbino); Jules picks up Thérèse (Marie Dubois), who does not stay long. In time they meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), and both of them are caught. She dresses as a boy, with a cap and a painted moustache, and cheats them both in a race across a footbridge. Jules asks his friend to leave this one alone. Then the war comes and puts the two men in opposite trenches.
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Truffaut’s film about two friends and the woman who joins them is quick, funny and generous for an hour, and then it grows up, which is harder. Moreau’s Catherine is the reason to see it; the men around her are drawn thinner than she deserves.
François Truffaut had made two films before this one, The 400 Blows and Shoot the Pianist, and both moved faster than anything else being made in France. Jules and Jim, adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel, is the one where the speed has a subject. It is about two friends, an Austrian and a Frenchman, who love the same woman across a war and the years after it, and it is told at the pace of people who are young and assume that will last. We would send most people to see it, with one warning we will come to.
Oskar Werner plays Jules small, careful and kind, a man who seems to be apologising for taking up a chair. Henri Serre’s Jim is tall and unbothered and gets on with everyone. They are happy together before Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) arrives, and Truffaut spends the first twenty minutes showing us that happiness in short bursts: a boxing lesson, a café, a slide of a statue’s face. When Catherine does arrive she puts on a cap and a painted moustache, takes the two of them to a footbridge and shouts go before the count is finished. We laughed out loud, and it was the moment the film had us, because Raoul Coutard runs the camera alongside the three of them and Claudine Bouché cuts so that the cheat and the joy land at the same time.
Coutard shoots in a wide frame and refuses to let it sit still. The camera wheels over rooftops, whips from face to face at a table, tracks along a beach after three people on bicycles. Bouché stops the picture dead on Moreau’s face three or four times in a row when Jim first looks at her properly, as if the film cannot decide which expression to keep. Elsewhere she cuts in old newsreel of the trenches, stretched to fit the frame, while Michel Subor’s narrator tells us each man is afraid of killing the other. The device should feel like a lecture. It does not, because the footage is real and the men we have just been laughing with have gone into it.
Georges Delerue’s score is light and quick and slightly sad, and Truffaut uses it the way he uses the narration: to carry the story over years in seconds. The scene everyone remembers is the song. Catherine sings a small tune about a whirlwind while Albert (Serge Rezvani) plays guitar and Jules and Jim sit and watch. Moreau’s singing is thin and a little flat and completely unguarded, and it moved us more than we expected, because for once nobody in the room is performing. They are just listening to a woman they all want, and knowing it.
Then the film slows down, and the second half takes a turn we will not describe. What we can say is that the chalet by the Rhine, where much of it happens, is a smaller world than Paris, and the film knows it. Fred Capel’s rooms are bare and white and the same three people keep walking into them. The freedom of the first hour turns into a set of arrangements, and Truffaut is honest enough not to pretend the arrangements are still fun. The cost is that scenes repeat, and Subor’s narrator is asked to explain more than he should.
The warning is Catherine. Moreau is extraordinary, and the film lets her be a person for long stretches: funny, cruel, bored, alert to any slight. But when the men talk about her, and they talk about her a great deal, she becomes weather, a force to be endured and admired, and the narrator joins in. Jim in particular is thinly written, a man who wants what he is told to want, and Serre has less to play than Werner does. Most critics have forgiven this. We forgive most of it, because Moreau keeps stepping out of the frame the men have built for her.
At 106 minutes it is Truffaut’s most loved film and not his most careful. See it for the first hour, which has few equals for speed and warmth, and stay for what that speed turns out to cost. Watch it with someone you have known a long time.
Not one of the nine reviews comes down against Truffaut’s film, and most place it near the top of their scale. The praise gathers in two places. The first is Jeanne Moreau, whose Catherine most critics treat as the reason the film still holds: volatile, free, and hard to look away from. The second is the filmmaking itself, with the camerawork and editing singled out repeatedly for their energy and invention. Several reviews also credit the three leads together for making the triangle work.
The reservations are modest and scattered rather than shared. Slant Magazine finds the character writing thin in places and the ending hastily staged, and The Guardian, while otherwise admiring, has doubts about how the film sees Catherine and the men who orbit her. Variety, writing on release, calls it occasionally uneven. The two earliest reviews are also the coolest; the spread is narrow, and the film’s standing has, if anything, risen since.
The five-star rating indicates an enthusiastic verdict. The accessible metadata does not reveal what the critic specifically praises.
Read the full review →Parkinson praises the film as a glorious, humane summation of New Wave ideas. He singles out Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine and Truffaut’s inventive use of images and editing.
Read the full review →Bradshaw regards Truffaut’s film as a whirlwind masterpiece, while questioning its portrayal of Catherine and the men around her. He singles out Jeanne Moreau’s performance and her delicate singing of “Le Tourbillon de la Vie.”
Read the full review →Rudolph considers the film an essential, enduring work despite shortcomings in its character writing and hastily staged ending. He particularly praises Truffaut’s expressive camerawork and the film’s generous, emotionally resonant details.
Read the full review →The critic sees the film as a dazzling, emotionally free account of love. They single out Truffaut’s technical virtuosity and the impeccable performances of the three leads.
Read the full review →The review finds the film candid and tender overall, though sometimes uneven. It praises Truffaut’s light touch in evoking moods, time, place, and desire.
Read the full review →
Bande à part · not on Fi1m yetGodard’s three-way friendship, with a run through the Louvre instead of a footbridge.
Design for Living · not on Fi1m yetLubitsch does the same arrangement as a comedy and keeps everyone’s dignity intact.
Two English Girls · not on Fi1m yetTruffaut returns to Roché, older and sadder, with the sexes reversed.
Y tu mamá tambiénTwo boys, one woman, a road, and a narrator who knows more than they do.
Le Bonheur · not on Fi1m yetVarda’s sunlit answer to the idea that love can be shared without cost.
