Jules and Jim (1962)

François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim) tells the story of two friends, Jules and Jim. The film takes place just before, during, and just after the first World War. Early on in the film the two meet a woman, Catherine. Jules soon marries her and war breaks out. After the war Jim comes to live with them. The marriage has failed and Jules gives Jim his blessing to marry Catherine. Eventually that doesn't work out so Jim goes to Paris to marry someone else and Jules and Catherine remain together. After this it becomes sort of a back-and-forth love affair. Despite all this, Jules and Jim remain the best of friends. Overall, I did not particularly care for this despite my fondness for the previous François Truffaut film I saw.

This film stars several French actors I have never heard of. The actors playing Jules and Jim are pretty good, although nothing terribly exciting. Jeanne Moreau, who played Catherine, was actually very good and her character was by far the most memorable part of this film.

This film is of the French New Wave and employs several stylistic elements of this movement. The film makes use of frequent tracking shots which are made a little different by filming from a bike to give kind of a bouncy feel. The film makes heavy use of wipes and masking. The film also adds some stock newsreel footage and freeze frames to further the stylistic effect.

While this film is one of the more famous examples of the French New Wave, I wouldn't recommend it. Like Breathless and The 400 Blows, this film is rather existential and nothing particularly important happens during the film. This film is also a love story, as was Breathless. Unlike those two films, there was nothing that really made me care. While Catherine was certainly an interesting character, the title characters of Jules and Jim were not. They came off as rather unexciting and I never really cared for any of them. Despite being kind of interesting, Catherine was not someone I cared much about. Combine all this and you end up with a movie that isn't particularly exciting. It may be famous and philosophical, but in the end it fails to do the primary job of a movie which is to entertain and it is well-deserving of a pretty low score.

64/100
D