Chinese postcard. Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim / Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962).
French postcard in the Collection Cinéma by Editions Art & Scene, Paris, no. CF 88. Photo: R. Cauchetier. Jeanne Moreau, Henri Serre and Oskar Werner in Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962).
A famous love triangle
Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962) starts with a quote: "Tu m’as dit: 'Je t’aime'. Je t’ai dit: 'Attends'. J’ allais dire: 'Prends-moi'. Tu m’ as dit: 'Va-t-en'. (You said, 'I love you', I said, 'Wait'. I was going to say, 'Take me', you said, 'Go away'.) We are in Paris, 1912. Two writers, the shy, German Jules (Oskar Werner) and the Bohemian Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre) develop a close friendship. They share an interest in literature, art and women. At a slide show, the two become entranced with a bust of a goddess with a serene smile and travel to an island in the Adriatic Sea to see it. Back from Greece, they meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), who has a similar smile on her face. Both men fall in love with her and the three become inseparable. When they go on holiday with Catherine, the two friends become distant. Jules senses everything has changed and warns Jim that Catherine will be his wife. The friends always traded and shared their girlfriends, “but not this one, Jim. OK?” Jim agrees and continues to be involved with his girlfriend Gilberte (Vanna Urbino), usually seeing her apart from Jules and Catherine. Catherine asks to speak with Jim at a cafe, but she does not show up on time and he leaves. Catherine chooses Jules and marries him. But the friendship between the two men endures.
When World War I breaks out, the three lose track of each other. The two friends are haunted by the fear of killing each other in battle. After the war, Jules and Catherine live together with their daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin) in a chalet in the Black Forest. They invite Jim to stay for a while. He sees that Jules and Catherine are growing apart and that their marriage is unhappy. His old love for Catherine blossoms again. They all live together and Jim and Catherine become increasingly close, eventually wanting to have a child. Jules doesn't mind and promises to love Catherine no matter what. But Catherine is eternally dissatisfied and keeps changing her mind about her choice of lover. The ardour and passion binding Catherine and Jim fade, giving way to a tense, stormy atmosphere in which Catherine threatens to kill Jim. Finally, Catherine kills herself and Jim by driving over a destroyed bridge in her new car and failing to brake at the end of the carriageway. Jules watches helplessly.
Henri-Pierre Roché wrote his novel 'Jules et Jim' in 1953 when he was 73. His novel is largely autobiographical: Jim is based on himself, and Jules and Catherine are directly inspired by the German writer Franz Hessel and his wife Helen Grund. They were the parents of Stéphane Hessel, a Resistance fighter and diplomat born in Berlin in 1917. After the death of Helen Hessel (née Grund) in 1982 at the age of 96, the identity of the people who inspired this famous trio was publicly revealed. Henri-Pierre Roché's notebooks entitled 'Carnets, Les années Jules et Jim, Première partie, 1920-1921' were published in 1990 with a preface by François Truffaut. The German author Manfred Flügge wrote a factual novel about Roché and the Hessel couple entitled 'Gesprungene Liebe. The true story of ‘Jules and Jim’', which was published in 1993. In 1996, the publication of some of Helen Hessel's letters to Henri-Pierre Roché followed in 'Lettres d'Helen, lettres à Henri-Pierre Roché, 1920-1921'.
Director, producer and co-scriptwriter François Truffaut altered several elements of the novel in his adaptation. He changed the character of German Kathe in the novel into French Catherine in the film. In the novel, Kathe has two children, whereas in the film she has only one daughter. Rather than replace scenes from the novel that were difficult to adapt with equivalent scenes, Truffaut had Michel Subor read passages from Roché's novel in voice-over. Earlier, Truffaut had denounced the practice of using 'equivalent scenes' in his famous article ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma Française' (A Certain Trend in French cinema), which he published in 1954 in Les Cahiers du Cinema. The scenes with Subor worked well and brought the literary flavour of the novel to the screen.
The period of the film is 20 years without the characters showing any signs of ageing. Instead, Truffaut placed thirteen reproductions of paintings by Pablo Picasso in the film which are temporal markers but also clues reflecting the state of mind or transformations of the characters in the foreground. At the start of the film, Truffaut placed 'L'Étreinte dans la mansarde' in Jules's flat, reflecting his desire to find the company of a woman, and 'Famille d'acrobates avec singe' in Jim's flat, reflecting his more flighty, acrobat-like character. Similarly, in the scene where Jim is waiting for Catherine in a café, Picasso's painting 'Au Lapin Agile: Arlequin au verre Au Lapin Agile' can be seen in the background, depicting a relationship similar to Pablo Picasso and Germaine Pichot, who had the reputation of being a femme fatale with whom Carles Casagemas was madly in love.
French postcard in the Collection Cinéma by Editions Art & Scene, Paris, no. CF 891996. Photo: R. Cauchetier. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre (left) in Jules et Jim / Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962).
Dutch collectors card in the series 'Filmsterren: een portret' by Edito Service, 1995. Photo: Sunset / KIPA-Interpress. Jeanne Moreau and Henri Serre in Jules et Jim / Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962).
Charges of immorality
François Truffaut came across the novel 'Jules et Jim' in 1956 in a second-hand bookshop in Paris. He later befriended the old author, Henri-Pierre Roché, who approved of Truffaut's interest in adapting his semi-autobiographical novel. Truffaut was also a big fan of Ernst Lubitsch's comedy Design for Living (1933). The basic plot of this film classic is the same as that of 'Jules and Jim': two friends fall in love with the same woman. But where Lubitsch made a comedy, Truffaut made a drama. Lubitsch's film also ends in a car, but with a happy ending: the three lovers are reunited and continue to live together. ‘Jules et Jim is a hymn to life and death, a demonstration through joy and sadness of the impossibility of any amorous combination outside the couple’, wrote Truffaut a year before filming.
For the two friends, Truffaut chose Austrian stage actor Oskar Werner, and French actor Henri Serre, who were both relatively unknown at the time. Truffaut was impressed by Werner's role in Max Ophüls's film Lola Montès (1955). Years later, Truffaut would give him another leading role in his film Fahrenheit 45 (1966) about a world where books are banned. He chose Henri Serre because of his stunning resemblance to Henri-Pierre Roché. Like Roché, Serre is tall, slim and has a sonorous voice. For Catherine, he chose Jeanne Moreau. Film historian Peter Bosma: 'Jeanne Moreau is the perfect choice for the portrayal of Catherine. She has the strong charisma of a headstrong, non-conformist woman, capable of anything: crime, but also melancholic endless walks.'
Jules et Jim was released in 1962, at the time of the creative explosion of the Nouvelle Vague. It was François Truffaut’s third feature film after Les 400 Coups / The 400 Blows (1959) and the crime drama Tirez sur le pianiste / Shoot the Piano Player (1960). After the latter flopped, Truffaut was forced to make his next film on a low budget and he shot some indoor scenes for his next film at friends' homes. He was determined that Jules et Jim became a success, otherwise filming in the future would become very difficult. He adapted his film to the taste of the general public, in which he amazed his contemporaries. But his tactic paid off. Jules et Jim's success exceeded even Truffaut's own expectations. Film critic Roger Ebert: 'Although a case can be made for Godard’s A Bout de Souffle / Breathless (1960) (based on a story by Truffaut), Jules et Jim / Jules and Jim was perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of those first astonishing films that broke with the past. There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time. In the energy pulsing from the screen, you can see the style and sensibility that inspired Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a film Truffaut was once going to direct, and which jolted American films out of their torpor."
Initially, the film was boycotted in Italy and received an ‘over 18’ status in France. American critic Pauline Kael defended the film against the charges of immorality: "Jules and Jim is not only one of the most beautiful films ever made and the greatest motion picture of recent years, it is also, viewed as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral. Truffaut does not use the screen for messages or special pleading or to sell sex for money; he uses the film medium to express his love and knowledge of life as completely as he can." Her colleague Roger Ebert added: "Truffaut’s camera is nimble, its movement so fluid that we sense a challenge to the traditional Hollywood grammar of establishing shot, closeup, reaction shot and so on; “Jules and Jim” impatiently strains toward the hand-held style. The narrator also hurries things along, telling us that there is no time to show us. The use of a narrator became one of Truffaut’s favorite techniques; it’s a way of signaling us that the story is over and its ending known before it even begins. His use of brief, almost unnoticeable freeze-frames treats some of the moments as snapshots, which also belong to the past."
Jules et Jim won the 1962 Étoile de Cristal, with Jeanne Moreau winning that year's prize for best actress, and became a huge success in Europe and the United States. The film unleashed a veritable craze in ‘Jules et Jim’ merchandise, such as caps, T-shirts, etc. It gave Truffaut a high profile in the film world, but he also became an international star. Years later, François Truffaut also adapted Roché's second novel 'Les deux anglaises et le continent' (1956) into a film, the romantic drama Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent / Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971) starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Claude, Kika Markham as Anne, and Stacey Tendeter as Muriel. The film also tells about a passionate triangle in which three people are trapped, all in love with all, all reluctant to hurt the others.
French postcard in the Collection Cinéma by Editions Art & Scene, Paris, no. CF 81, 1995. Photo: Raymond Cauchetier. Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim / Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962).
French postcard in the Collection Noire by Editions Hazan, Paris, no. 6109, 1989. Photo: Les films du Carosse, Paris. François Truffaut at the set of Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1961).
Sources: Roger Ebert (Roger Ebert.com), Peter Bosma (Dutch), Marc Pieters (Dutch), Wikipedia (Dutch, French and English) and IMDb.
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