.Having watched this film twice, I can say it consistently gives me a conflicted reaction. I love Truffaut’s stylish filmmaking, particularly in the freewheeling first half-hour, but always find the story, frankly, a little tedious. I want to know more about the inner lives of the characters, Catherine especially, than I’m given, so I react with impatience to the fumbling second half of the film.
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It is, to a certain extent, fitting that the second half is about fumbling, as that is what the characters are doing, feeling their way intuitively through a new life and new morality, but somehow the film never really develops the kind of depth of perspective or psychology to make the characters and the film truly affecting. Catherine’s siren-like irresistibility never feels true – I wish the film had more to say about her than to pass her off as a semi-mystical force of feminine caprice. I prefer Truffaut’s follow-up, Two English Girls, an altogether darker, less blithe, less euphemised adaptation of a Henri-Pierre Roche novel involving a ménage a trois – that film burns with a kind of frustrated midnight ardour, where Jules et Jim skips gaily along until it seems to realise it should be being serious about something, but doesn’t know why. .
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That said, it’s an often beguiling, and, occasionally, very funny film. It articulates an intriguing thesis, on the exhaustion of European civility, which theoretically enables this situation but really only exacerbates it troubles, and the attempts to construct something new. Jim speaks the unwritten theory: “You tried to invent love. But pioneers must be humble, without egotism.” Whereas Catherine and Jules are all ego, despite their longing – only the selfless but morally impotent Jules survives, and remains in the heart. Jules et Jim feels like both a nod to fin de siecle bohemianism, and also a fanfare for ‘60s experimentalism, and other, more substantial films, like Two English Girls or Eustache’s The Mother and The Whore.
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