JULES AND JIM

Let me begin by saying that it is very difficult for me to write an objective, focused research paper on this film because it is my favorite movie of all time, and I cannot disguise the personal impact it has had on me. I started out with a clear intention of writing about how this film reflected the changing moral attitudes of the 1960’s, as it was specifically manifest in the social and sexual liberation of women. However, the more I thought and read about it, I realized that what makes this film so great is that it defies reduction to such a simple thesis, partly because the film itself has no definitive message. It is, rather, an exploration of human relationships that provides many more questions than it does answers. It is this attribute that makes the film more than historically significant in the narrow socio-political sense of the word, and brings it up to the level of a great work of art whose significance lies in its reflection of the questions and contradictions of an entire epoch. So my more ambitious goal in this paper is to show how Jules and Jim reflects a new understanding of being for both men and women in an age where identities are no longer clearly defined, and any attempt fit one’s life into a fixed role, according to fixed rules, is bound to be futile.

However, I will try to keep this paper grounded by focusing first on the character of Catherine as an embodiment of a new style of existence, and second, on the cinematic style of the film, whose drastic changes in mood reflect the attitude of the French new wave in general, where new grounds were being explored and "anything was permitted." Truffaut himself said about the film that it was about, "an aesthetic and new morality incessantly reconsidered." Again, I was first going to focus on the part about the "new morality", but instead I will think more about the "incessant reconsideration," the former being a mere reflection of the latter.

First, a few facts about Truffaut and the film: Truffaut was born in 1932, in Paris. He had an unhappy childhood, and was raised by the cinema, so to speak, where he constantly sought refuge. He was discovered and practically adopted by the famous French film scholar, André Bazin, who took him in as a writer for his legendary monthly magazine, Cahiers du Cinema. He wrote for the magazine for almost ten years, along with Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer, all of whom later became influential directors as part of the French New Wave. In 1959, Truffaut made his first feature, Les 400 Coups, for which he won Best Director at the Cannes film festival. Jules and Jim was his third feature, which he made in 1961. The film follows the relationship of two friends, Jules, played by German actor Oskar Werner, and Jim, played by Henri Serre, who fall in love with the same woman, Catherine, played by Jeanne Moreau. The film spans almost thirty years, from around 1907 to 1935. Jules and Jim was a commercial and critical success and further established Truffaut as a world class director.

The Legion of Decency immediately condemned the film, saying in a statement that the story had been developed "in a context alien to Christian and traditional morality," and that "if the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is so obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant and consequently pose a serious problem for a mass medium of entertainment." This quote serves well to begin one of my usual philosophical digressions and reveal the true inspiration for my analysis. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, made his famous declaration that "God is dead." He went on to explain that this does not mean that people have just stopped "believing in God," but, rather, that we no longer live in a world where we can look for definite answers in some metaphysical source. In other words, we live in a world where the traditional answers no longer make sense. Instead, Nietzsche proposed that we stop looking for unified explanations and start embracing the contradictions of life. He stated that, "above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity."

This is why it makes so much sense for the Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization, to say that this film was made in a context alien to it. In other words, I would not disagree with the Legion’s statement, but I would merely add that in Jules and Jim, Truffaut denies the context of Christian morality for one more appropriate to our age, one which Nietzsche anticipated: that is, the film exists in a world where people admit their contradictory impulses, and try, with greater or lesser success, to live accordingly. It should be stressed though that Truffaut does not introduce us, as Godard does with the character of Michel in Breathless, to characters who have already fully accepted a nihilistic world. Rather, the characters in Jules and Jim are in a constant process of discovery throughout the film. They have grown up in a world of set rules, and they seem to be the first to question them, hence their tremendous difficulties.

With that, let us look more closely at the film, for all this is most evident in the character of Catherine the object of Jules’ and Jim’s attraction and fascination. That it is misguided to see Catherine as some sort of role model for modern women is made evident early in the film, when we see that Catherine rejects the very identity of womanhood.^* Before going out with her new friends, she disguises herself as a man. The narrator tells us that Jules and Jim were intrigues by this "symbol they couldn’t quite understand." Its not that they are missing something, but that Catherine embodies something that simply cannot be understood, cannot be classified. This is made explicit in the very next scene, where Jules explains all the contradictions that Catherine embodies, telling Jim about her eclectic tastes and background. Annette Insdorf elaborates this point in her book on Truffaut: "Anything one can say about [Catherine] has its contrary…she is creative and destructive, the source of embodiment of both life and death, open and mysterious, calm and passionate; she had aristocratic parents but enjoys peasant pursuits; resisting all labels, she is friend and lover, mother and spoiled child. Ultimately, she suggests an androgynous figure, as masculine as feminine."

Some simple minded contemporary critics, people who were used to easy answers, if not in life, then at least in film, were overly frustrated by the contradictions and seeming lack of reason in Jules and Jim, and they went so far as to call it all pointless. Stanley Kauffmann attacked the film in The New Republic, saying that Truffaut created many scenes solely for the sake of his own love of cinema, "because Truffaut enjoyed these scenes in themselves; that seems to be the only reason." This comment so misses the point, it hardly warrants a response. In one scene Kauffman complains about (for a long silence where the characters don’t come up with quick clever dialogue that doesn’t always occur in life) Jules expresses his frustration at the change of words’ genders from French to German. After listing many examples, Jules says that in German, "life is neuter," by which Truffaut seems to be telling us that life cannot be reduced and classified. Insdorf adds, "there is something of this ambiguity in Catherine, for she does represent "life"–but life that contains the seeds of its own violation."

Catherine is always doing things that seem senseless at first glance but are always reactions to being reduced to a tangible identity. For example, after seeing a Swedish play, Jules and Jim discuss the female character in the play. Jules and Jim did not like her, but Catherine defends her for wanting to be free and "inventing her own life." When Jules then digresses to an argument about women in general, quoting Baudelaire, Catherine suddenly jumps in the Seine river. This is not so much an act of protest for it is not an argument against Jules’ statements. Rather, Catherine seems to be saying, "Don’t think you can ever understand me or predict my behavior."

It should be remembered that Jules and Jim fell first fell for Catherine because she resembled a statue that they saw. The statue represented an ideal form (a basic tenet of Plato’s philosophy which Nietzsche violently rejected,) and Catherine is constantly denying her role as some sort of ideal, "for she is more complex than a statue, more mysterious than a model." This brings us to a possible objection to my argument. One might ask, "why then, does Catherine end up so unhappy? What is it about her freedom that leads her to kill herself in the end?" This question shows how Truffaut was not satisfied with easy answers, for it is not so easy to escape idealism, and despite all of Catherine’s efforts, she still hangs on to her own sort of ideal: that of complete and utter freedom. Andrew Sarris said, in the Village Voice, that Jules and Jim shows us "the sweet pain of the impossible and the magnificent failure of an ideal." In other words, the source of Catherine’s ultimate failure is her substitution of one ideal for another. Jim is trying to get at this when he tells Catherine that although she tried to reinvent the rules, she failed because she did so selfishly. A world without identities does not leave room for that kind of selfishness, because, as I keep stressing, there is no more concrete "self" in the traditional sense. There is no self whose preservation one should be overly concerned about (again, we can contrast Catherine with the character of Michel Poiccard in Breathless, who is too busy living to be concerned with the idea of freedom for its own sake.)

Other critics too, who misunderstood the difficult discovery of life’s essential groundlessness, were unable to appreciate the motivation of the characters in Jules and Jim. Peter Baker, in a contemporary article said that "the young people are in fact not so very different to [sic] many young people of today, turning away from the issues of life and indulging only in their animal instincts, for comfort and enjoyment." He is right that, as I have tried to argue, the people resemble "young people today," and there is something to the idea of getting back to our animal instincts (again, something Nietzsche proposed,) but Mr. Baker’s analysis of the motivation behind it is absurd. First, the characters are not at all turning away from the issues of life, rather they are confronting them head on. Second, the result of this confrontation is anything but comfortable and enjoyable. The characters suffer all the consequences of their behavior, and any joys they might experience are accompanied by the harsh realities that life imposes. Even Time magazine, that didn’t exactly rave about the film, recognized that since "this film is an exercise in contradiction…I very much doubt that Jules and Jim will be very generally comfortable to most audiences." In other words, neither the characters in the film, nor the members of the audience are meant to get a sense of comfort from the world represented in this film. We are instead asked to question our comfortable existence as the characters themselves do.

Now, the reader might make a pedagogical objection, saying, "Yes, Tao, what you are saying is well and good, but an analysis of Catherine’s character does not count as showing the historical significance of Truffaut’s film." All I can say is that now that the 1960’s are over, a concern empowering women in the political sense seems secondary to a questioning of what it means to be a woman, of what the role of gender is in society, and to asking whether it is possible to escape the deep rooted conventions of every day human relations. By asking these deeper questions, Truffaut made a film that is as relevant today, in our so called post-modern society, as it was almost 40 years ago, when it was made.

We can, however, analyze the film a little bit more specifically in terms of its technical innovations, for, again, whereas many critics saw the whimsical mood changes exhibited in the technique as frivolous, they too reflect a dissatisfaction with conventions. This dissatisfaction not only allowed for a redefinition of the filmic vocabulary, but it parallels the story of characters questioning their own social conventions. Just as the characters invent their life moment by moment, "The music, the camera and editing movement, the rhythm of the film carry us along without pauses for reflection. Truffaut doesn’t linger; nothing is held too long, nothing is overstated, or even stated."

This is not always true, though, for although rhythm is one of the most important things about this film, the rhythm is not constant. The film begins quickly, but when the characters’ problems deepen in the second part of the film the rhythm slows down. It does give us time for reflection, for not only are the characters reflecting on their own stances toward their relationships, but Truffaut himself seems to be in a state of exploration as he is making the film. For example, "Truffaut never hesitates to slow his camera down, to slide in and hold the characters in close-up for important dialogue scenes. And then, smoothly, the movement starts up again: aerial shots scoop down and we soar away." This, in turn allows the audience to think about what is going on. Truffaut said that "it can happen that when the film is done, it is completely different to what it was proposed to say in the first place. The shooting of the film is that sort of adventure." In other words, there are three levels of exploration going on, first, in the characters’ lives, second, in Truffaut’s representation of these lives, and finally in the audience’s viewing of the film.

It must be remembered, finally, that although Jules and Jim presents us with a powerful female character, the film is made from a man’s point of view. This allows for a constant sense of mystery and never allows us a complete understanding. And this inability to understand is, in the end, the point of the film. In other words, Truffaut seems to be saying that in today’s world all we can hope to do is explore and interpret, rather than know concretely. In the words of Nietzsche, "How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this: whether existence without interpretation, without "sense", does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation."

© Tao Ruspoli, November 18, 1998