596 - Jules and Jim, France, 1962. Dir. Francois Trufaut.
Jules and Jim are best friends.
Like David and Jonathan. With no equivalent in love. They enjoy the little things together. They eat at restaurants. They buy cigars.
People call them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
They are art students in Paris. Jules is from Austria and Jim, from France. While strangers, Jules asks Jim to help him get into the Art Students' Ball. Jim gets him a ticket and a costume. And girls.
The musician. The sweet thing. The pretty blonde widow. Her quiet friend. The professional. Therese. Gilberte.
"I wasn't in love with her. She was both mother and daughter to me."
Their friendship is born. They teach each other their languages and translate each other's poetry.
Jules is short and blond and thoughtful and studious. He has kind and tender eyes. Jim is tall and brunette and outgoing. He follows his instincts.
They meet Albert. A patron of the arts. He shows them statues. He shows them slides of statues. One, a bust, stands out to them. Subtly smiles at them. Beckons them. They go to see it. At an outdoor museum on an Adriatic island.
"They stared at the face for an hour. It stunned them into silence. They were speechless. Had they ever met such a smile? No. If they ever met it, they would follow it."
And follow it they do.
Jim's cousin writes. Three girls are coming to Paris. One is German, one is Dutch, and one is French.
Beware the French.
"Catherine, the French girl, was the statue. She had the same smile, nose, mouth, chin, and forehead. As a child, she had been idolized in her hometown during a religious celebration. It started almost like a dream. . . . "
And her impetuous ways.
The boys have seem impetuosity before.
After all, Jules' previous girlfriend, Therese--come on, come on--could do the locomotion. Or the locomotive, or steam engine, as it were. She would light a cigarette and insert the lit end into her mouth, glide about the room in a circle, and blow smoke out the unlit end like a steam train.
But they have never seen someone jump into the Seine before. While returning one night from watching August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888), Jules and Jim witness an unpredictability in Catherine that trumps Anita Ekberg's trek into the Trevi Fountain.
And it seals their fate.
"Jim never forgot that jump. . . . His admiration for Catherine struck him like lightning as he blew her an invisible kiss."
The three of them in their youth pursue a life free of social or moral constraint. And in those heady days, it seems they have discovered Eden. Eve with her two Adams.
She dresses like a boy. They go out in public. Sure enough, a man asks her for a light thinking she is a boy. She challenges them to a race. A race atop a pedestrian bridge. That moment is captured on film in space and time.
Joy.
Freedom.
Friendship.
Until life sets in. Marriage. Responsibility. The Great War.
Jules marries Catherine. And then gets conscripted.
Jules is called to fight for Germany, and Jim, for France. They fear that in their fighting they will face each other. Their situation sobers them.
Afterwards, when Jim returns to visit, he finds them residing in a cottage in the Black Forest, with their daughter Sabine.
Things are not as they were. Jules has settled in, and one might even say that he is the one who has acquiesced to the austere and lonely offices of love.
But Catherine has forged ahead with self-absorbed insistence. And has had affairs. She now returns to Jim, as if to force reignition of their former splendor.
Jules relents. A willing martyr to Catherine's happiness. With the notion that having Jim around will keep her from leaving too. He has his books and his poetry to protect him.
But Jim and Catherine are older now and too much alike.
Catherine decides that she can love Jim if he can give her a child. She waits for a time to ensure she is not carrying a child by Albert. Talk about a patron. And then she tries with Jim.
Meanwhile, Jim has Gilberte to fall back on.
But this relationship is doomed. Driven by self-interest and caprice. Adults going through the motions of their expired Bohemian youth.
By the time Catherine locks Jim in an upstairs room and pulls a gun on him, her unpredictability is no longer charming. Or unpredictable.
He gets the gun. He jumps out the window. He throws away the key and runs away.
We are told that in the real-life story she actually shot him.
So much for unbridled moral freedom without consequences.
The final fallout is even graver.
We may observe that Jules and Jim predates Thelma & Louise by nearly 30 years.
And you may guess how it ends.
Yet Jules for all this is "overcome with relief."
Left alone to live as a grown up.
Did seeing Miss Julie affect Catherine the night she jumped into the river? Miss Julie was taught by her mother to submit to no man. She pursues her own devices. She enters into a relationship with Jean that lies outside the limits of her place and time. He tells her of his efforts of self-slaughter. Their nonconformist stance collapses. She takes his razor and leaves the stage.
Francois Truffaut made the movie from a novel he stumbled upon in the bargain bin--the kind your find in a second-hand store. While he was still a film critic and not yet a director. He read it twice a year for the next five years. And knew it inside and out.
He wished films could cover topics like this. A woman who loves two men. Where one man is kind and the other is not. With the idea of being both dramatic and humorous in tone.
The author, Henri-Pierre Roche, lived his life as an art lover. And a patron. He was one of the first people to support Picasso.
After becoming bedridden at age 73, Roche took up writing. He wrote from his memories of the three-way affair he had fifty years before.
"All this must have been painful to live through, but 50 years later it enchants him." - Francois Truffaut.
"It had to be filmed like an old photo album." - Francois Truffaut.
"He divided his life between his love for women and his love for friendship." - Francois Truffaut.
"Their love is a dead end. They can't live together or apart. She takes her life and takes him with her." - Francois Truffaut.
"Truffaut is too intelligent to fall for his characters' malarkey, but he's also too generous to judge them (in other words, he's a major artist). - Chuck Bowen.
* * * *
This film is thoroughly French.
Yet we have seen this subject before.
In an American film in 1933.
Based on a British play from 1932.
Based on a relationship from 1921.
In Ernest Lubitsch's film adaptation of Noel Coward's Design for Living.
Design for Living (1933)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/10/300-design-for-living-united-states.html
* * * *
We have seen Oskar Werner in the following films so far: Max Ophuls' Lola Montes (1955), Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), and Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966).
Lola Montes (1955)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/094-lola-montes-1955-france-dir-max.html
The Spy Who Came in from The Cold (1965)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/10/283-spy-that-came-in-from-cold-united.html
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/02/418-fahrenheit-451-united-kingdom-1966.html
* * * *
I was in love with Napoleon. I dreamt I met him in an elevator. We had a child, and I never saw him again.
I was taught, Our Father who arts in Heaven. I thought it said arts. I imagined my father with an easel painting in Paradise.
She said No, but so gently that I am still hoping.
A sense of relief flooded over him.
* * * *
Franz Hessel (1880-1941) - "Jules"
Henri-Pierre Roche (1879-1959) - "Jim"
Helen Hessel (1886-1982) - "Catherine"
"I think that the erotic was very important to her. It was the center of her life." - Gisele Freund
"She was very chic and elegant and knew exactly what she wanted." - Gisele Freund
"Whatever suited her was important. She didn't care too much whether other people went along. Also, she didn't necessarily treat very fairly the men who were in love with her. One could have held all kinds of things against her, but no one did because she was very charming and very attractive and expressed herself extremely well." - Stephane Hessel, her son
"I think Helen Hessel was very interested in human relationships, and in love in a general sense." - Gisele Freund
"I felt more admiration for my mother and more trust for my father." - Stephane Hessel.
She translated Nabokov's Lolita after she turned 70.
"She was too conservative." - Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohle.
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