Taglines: A hymn to life and love.
Jules and Jim movie storyline. In 1912 Paris, the French bon-vivant Jim meets the insecure German Jules and they begin a great friendship. When they meet the fickle, independent French Catherine, they immediately fall in love with her. However Jules’ naiveness and fragility attracts the amoral Catherine and she marries him. With the First World War, best friends Jules and Jim are separated, but after the war they reunite in Jules’s cottage in Germany.
Jim stays with Jules, Catherine, and their daughter Sabine, and Jules tells his friend that while he has lived with Catherine she has had affairs with several lovers. When Catherine falls in love with Jim, Jules asks him to stay with her at his house. Through the years, Jules and Jim live a triangle of love with Catherine that never affects their friendship and respect.
Jules and Jim (French: Jules et Jim is a 1962 French New Wave romantic drama film, directed, produced and written by François Truffaut. Set around the time of World War I, it describes a tragic love triangle involving French Bohemian Jim (Henri Serre), his shy Austrian friend Jules (Oskar Werner), and Jules’s girlfriend and later wife Catherine (Jeanne Moreau).
The film is based on Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 semi-autobiographical novel describing his relationship with young writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married. Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a shop along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who had published his first novel at the age of 74. The author approved of the young director’s interest to adapt his work to another medium.
The film won the 1962 Grand Prix of French film prizes, the Étoile de Cristal, and Jeanne Moreau won that year’s prize for best actress. The film ranked 46 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema” in 2010. The soundtrack by Georges Delerue was named as one of the “10 best soundtracks” by Time magazine in its “All Time 100 Movies” list.
François Truffaut Style
One of the products of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), Truffaut incorporated newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut’s cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles.
The musical score is by Georges Delerue. One song, “Le Tourbillon” (“The Whirlwind”) by Serge Rezvani, which sums up the turbulence of the lives of the three main characters, became a popular hit.
The dialogue is predominantly in French, with occasional lines in German and one line in English.
Jeanne Moreau incarnates the style of the French New Wave actress. The critic Ginette Vincindeau has defined this as, “beautiful, but in a kind of natural way; sexy, but intellectual at the same time, a kind of cerebral sexuality—this was the hallmark of the nouvelle vague woman.” Though she isn’t in the film’s title, Catherine is “the structuring absence. She reconciles two completely opposed ideas of femininity.”
Jules and Jim (1962)
Directed by: François Truffaut
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre, Vanna Urbino, Sabine Haudepin, Serge Rezvani, Anny Nelsen, Marie Dubois, Michel Subor, Danielle Bassiak, Elen Bober, Dominique Lacarrière
Screenplay by: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
Production Design by: Fred Capel
Cinematography by: Raoul Coutard
Film Editing by: Claudine Bouché
Costume Design by: Fred Capel
Makeup Department: Simone Knapp
Music by: Georges Delerue
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Cinédis (France), Gala (UK), Janus Films (US)
Release Date: January 23, 1962
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