Ménage a Trois Writ Large- Francois Truffaut and Jean Moreau’s Jules et Jim

Ménage a Trois Writ Large- Francois Truffaut and Jean Moreau’s Jules et Jim 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Jules et Jim, starring Jean Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre, directed by Francois Truffaut, 1962

Recently in reviewing, inadequately reviewing in many way, the late 1930s classic French film, Jean Renoir’s The Rules Of  The Game, I mentioned that at certain points in the late 1960s and early 1970s you could see that film often as part of the French Cinema cycle periodically run at the old Brattle Theater in Harvard Square. Those were the days when many, including this reviewer lived to see what the latest cinematic concoction from France would be or caught up on what we had missed by being too young to have seen some of the 1950s film noir classics, used the experiences to brush up our misbegotten French rusting since high school, and to consciously thumb our noses at Hollywood-derived films which were not nearly as intellectually exciting. Yeah, we were still wet behind the ears in lots of things, cultural and political things, but I think were on to something because as many of the Hollywood films from the period now seem extremely dated many of the French and other foreign films seem still fresh. Still have something interesting to say about the mores of the times.  

Of course at one level the adventures of three young early 20^th century bohemians in Paris, two males and one female, and their love triangle is an old story told many times in literature and film. But at another level, the level that I and my then girlfriend experienced the film it dovetailed into questions we had about male-female relationships and about marriage. That latter idea we saw, and there is nothing in this film to contradict that notion, we saw as suffocatingly bourgeois (a term we freely used at the time to deride anything very conventional).

Here’s the way it played out in the first third of the 20^th century, the time line of the film. In the immediate pre-war period, pre-Great War as it was called then Jules, an awkward young Austrian intellectual, played by Oskar Werner, and Jim, played by Henri Serre, a more outgoing young French intellectual form a fast male-bonding friendship in Paris while hanging out searching for, well, searching for something beyond the humdrum existences they were expected to live, searching for some deeper meaning to life as the young often will.

They have their fair share of excitement …and women along the way. Then a breath of fresh air, a free-spirit, something out of the Greek calends, Catherine, played by Jean Moreau, comes in to confuse and upend their lives. (At the time of my first viewing of the film my girlfriend of the time, a graduate psychology student, had described Catherine as being manic-depressive what is now called a bi-polar disorder which I dismissed out of hand as so much showing off. I preferred, reflecting the Age of Aquarius “hippie” counter-cultural wand we were working under that free-spirited designation. On the re-viewing my companion called out Catherine’s behavior as a bi-polar disorder. Sometimes you cannot win.)    

Both men are attracted to Catherine no question but Jules needed, desperately needed, Catherine and so despite the upcoming war that would separate the two men, despite Catherine’s general favoring of Jim over Jules he after the war, which gets relatively little play as decisive in the lives of the two men, married her. She thereafter leads his a merry, or really not so merry chase, as Jules allows her to lead her own life, have her affairs as long as she does not in the end leave him. And despite her at times odd behavior she does stay with him until the end. A very strange end, indeed which I will let the reader discover by watching the film. It is the built-up to that end, the various twist and turns of their love triangle that makes this a great film, that and the acting of Ms. Moreau in particular which makes this one of the great French and world films of all times.