French Cinema: Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962)

(Note:  Contains spoilers)

For some reason I had some trouble at the start remembering which was Jules and which was Jim.  Jules (Oskar Werner)  was the German and Jim (Henri Serre) was the Frenchman.  They are lifelong friends who meet as young men in the years before the First World War.  All of this is told so rapidly that it is hard to both read the subtitles and look at the action on the screen.  I guess that's my fault for not knowing French, but it is hard not to learn some French when watching this film. 

 They are both involved vaguely in literary and journalistic work but not much else is shown of their professional lives.   What the film focuses on is their extraordinary relationship with a woman named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau)  over a period of years. 

These years span the years immediately prior to the First World War, and fifteen years after it.     Jules and Jim are irresistably drawn to this luminous and unstable personality, Catherine.   After an initial period where everyone is footloose and fancy free in Paris with romps in the countryside and races on footbridges.  There is no hint of darkness except when, walking home from a play, Jules with insensitivity launches into a disquisition on how awful women are, and Catherine impulsively jumps into the river in protest.   Then the War breaks out, and Jules, in the German army and Jim is in the French army.  Jules  is so concerned that he might shoot Jim if he fights on the Western front, that he opts to fight on the Eastern Front instead.  In the event, however, they both come through the war unscathed and pick up where they left off.

While Jim has Gilberte, his long-suffering beau, Jules takes Catherine off to live with him in Germany where they create and procreate.  She bears him a daughter, Sabine,  and helps to illustrate his book on insects.  He talks of writing a novel with insects as characters.   Jim soon comes to stay with them and they become as it were a menage a trois. 

It is by this time that we know that all is not right in the marriage of Catherine and Jules.  Catherine keeps having outside affairs and in other ways seems increasingly unstable.  Catherine fixes on Jim and then relapses to Jules, when she isn't going off to cavort with Albert, who is the occasional fourth wheel.  This is a woman whose manic energies make her very attractive to men but in a  direction  that clearly (as the story proceeds) insanity lies.  While Jim vacillates between marrying Catherine and going back to Gilberte, Jules, the cuckolded husband, clings to the scraps of what is left of his marriage, afraid apparently to move on. Catherine seems increasingly unstable, driving recklessly and in one scene (that seems to be repeated in "Day for Night" circling through a paved city square aimlessly and blaring her horn.   Finally Catherine summons Jim to her side.  When, at last fed up with her,  he coldly dismisses her and announces he is going to marry Gilberte, she takes a gun and announces her intention of shooting him.  He managed however to get the gun away from her and escapes.  A while passes and things are seemingly back to normal. 

Somewhat inexplicably, they meet up in a cinema while watching a newsreel of Nazis burning books.  Everything seems to be back to normal, as if nothing has happened.     They are sitting together, ruminating over the unsettling events in Germany when  Catherine invites Jim to go see something in her car.  They go driving off and begin crossing a bridge with an obviously missing span.  Jules looks up and see what is happening but cannot stop it.  Catherine and Jim fall into the river and drown.  Then in a rather grisly scene that mirrors that of the Nazi book burnings, Jules arranges for them both to be cremated (and the viewer is not spared even the sight of the coffins burning in the furnace but also the sight of the burnt fragments being crushed up and placed in the urns).  Jim has them   placed together in niches in a mausoleum and then he shuffles on home from the cemetery.

The ending certainly came as a shock.  Death usually does come as a shock, especially accidental death or death by design.  I mean there you are, having a day, and suddenly you die.  It wasn't as though Jim wasn't warned, especially by the scene where she pulls a gun on him, but clearly it wasn't enough to keep him away.  The moth and the flame.  The early scene in which she packs vitriol (concentrated Sulfuric Acid)  for the eyes of men who lie, is also indicative that she isn't quite all there.  

But this is how you end stories, and death is as good a way as any.  The story was based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché.   Stories are like that, you've had a nice ride, but now it's time to get off, so the characters end up doing something decisive and it's over.  Otherwise of course you would be following Jules and Jim and Catherine into old age.    It is hard to find any sympathy for Catherine, at least to my mind.  She is the inevitable crazy, oversexed woman that some men are drawn to. I do not think that long term relationships with women or men is impossible, but that for some men or women it is.