Jules and Jim (1962)

Not rated, but once again, we're dealing with a Criterion movie that is mostly about adultery and polygamy.  There is a subtext of sex throughout the piece, although you don't really see anything.  There is also a unique look at what mental health constitutes during the French New Wave.  As part of this, motifs of suicide find their way through the story.  There's also a war, where people die, but nothing is shown in any way.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR:  Francois Truffaut

What is going on with me?  While I ultimately ended up loving this movie, it had to work more than it should to get me on board. This was one of the ones I was afraid of.  There are titles and works of art that I know are smarter than me.  I've had Jules and Jim on my to-watch list for the past decade.  Something always happened that drove me away and distracted me from watching it.  But I got a copy of it for Christmas (because it was on my Amazon wishlist for ages) and that meant that I had to watch it.  But the most horrifying thing about the movie is that I did not care for it for the first half hour.

I wanted to like it from the word "go."  But the beginning of the movie was manic.  It was a lot to take in.  Thank goodness that I read up on the movie after taking a quick pause. That little bit of research opened my eyes to the fact that the movie was semi-autobiographical.  The manic element of the movie was an info dump that all seemed disposable.  Instead, Truffaut is leaning into the manic nature of life.  A lot of things led up to Jules and Jim growing so close.  And the movie needs them to be close for the foundation of the movie to make sense.  Because Truffaut is not Tolkien, he doesn't mind running through some of these beats with a little less attention that other movies would find vital.  I mean, it's not like I was going to abandon the movie.  I finish everything.  I have enough time to find out how something was going to end.  But I know that everyone isn't wired like I am.  For those people who might be put off by the manic opening of Jules and Jim, I encourage you to stick with it.

I'm just going to say it:  Catherine is a lot.  That is such a dismissive read of her.  If anything, Jules and Jim, amongst other things, is a critique of mental health in 1962.  It's not first and foremost.  But Catherine absolutely needs a solid therapist.  Honestly, they all do.  Every single character in this is dealing with relationships in the worst way possible.  A lot of it, I wrote off as simply being incredibly French.  I think I'm having the same frustrations with my journey through the Ingmar Bergman movies.  American stories about affairs and polygamy tend to be a lot more immediacy when it comes to dealing with feelings.  There's a far greater sense of ownership --which may or may not be the most healthy response in a relationship.  But movies like Jules and Jim have these soul-crushing moments in relationships that are treated with such casualness.  I'm putting a lot of the onus on Catherine because it's easy to do so, but be aware, everyone in here has screwed up priorities.  Catherine regularly jumps from relationship to relationship, outright hurting those people in her life that she claims to love.  Yes, I saw the romantic tension between Jim and Catherine from moment one.  We're all supposed to see that.  But in those early Paris scenes, Catherine reads as someone who has undiagnosed issues, but manages to be fairly functional in society.  (The jump in the river might be a bit of a red flag.) 

When she marries Jules, Jules vocalizes his frustrations with Catherine to Jim.  He claims that she is cheating on him and has abandoned her daughter.  But Catherine seems okay in this sequence.  It's almost hard to believe Jules because Catherine is so with it.  But when they walk, she tells Jim that he wants Jim to know her side of the story.  It comes across as sympathetic, but she doesn't actually say anything that would garner sympathy.  If anything, she simply confirms what Jules says.  It's in this moment where the movie becomes a very specific version of the adultery story.  I don't know if it's "French" like I said, or it's the way that artists and intellectuals deal with affairs of the heart.  Jules bemoans that Catherine is unfaithful to him with Albert, but Jules, Jim, and Catherine are all continually friendly with Albert.  The two borderline have their affair in Jules's face and he's just "Woe is me.  I'm just happy that she still includes me in her life."  Jules even gives Jim the mandate that Catherine is off-limits, but Jim still pursues her.  Jules catches them being romantic and he just allows it to happen.  It's almost an alternate tale of what it means to be cuckolded.  It's a tale where the first response isn't rage, but simply acceptance.  Because acceptance is the first reaction that Jules has to all of these scenes, it takes the relationship to a really weird place.  Because of that acceptance, Jules encourages Jim to have a relationship with Catherine because it means that Jules can stay in Catherine's life.

Then the movie takes an even weirder shift.  Again, I like all of this.  I dislike stories about adultery in general, but the thought experiment happening is interesting to me.  But the movie takes this shift of moving towards the responsible.  Jules and Catherine, post-war, have a daughter.  I feel horrible for this girl, by the way.  The movie seems to ignore the fallout that Sabine feels when Catherine and Jim decide to have their own relationship beyond Jules.  Catherine doesn't really seem to mother Sabine.  That's left up to cuckolded Jules, who has nothing to live for except for the survival of his daughter.  Yet, he's always excited to see Jim, which is an interesting take on the whole friends v. spouses debate.  Anyway, the movie becomes about Catherine wanting a child with Jim.  She gets angry when she can't become pregnant with his child and takes it out on Jim.  Jim, similarly, uses Gilbrete as a placeholder for his true feelings.  Because Gilbrete is a foil for Jules, she never holds Jim in contempt for his actions.  But this chasing of children and pregnancy reads very much like children playing dress up.  These two are the most immature characters in cinema and they're obsessed with having children.  I suppose that's kind of the point.

Listen, movies don't need to be espousing morals.  There are themes and ideas that weave their ways into stories and that's fine.  The bigger question is the position that Truffaut has on the events of the story.  Because I'm in the shadow of all these Bergman movies that touch on similar polygamy motifs, I can't help but think that there's something to do with the artist and the inability to be monogamous.  But all of these movies also share the same outcome of misery coming out of open relationships.  While these characters have a casual attitude to sleeping around and they all seem in mutual agreement that monogamy is impossible, all of them seem to be punished for their respective infidelities.  I mean, as cool as Jules, Jim, Catherine, and Gilbrete treat these selfish characters and the sexual freedoms that come with these actions (not judging!), the movie ends up with Catherine driving Jim off a bridge and drowning.  From Sabine's perspective, she just lost her mother because she was mad that her lover couldn't get her pregnant.  Also, Catherine tried shooting Jim before that.  It's bananas that Jim would ever see Catherine again.  I know that there's this line that had Jim relieved that he was no longer attracted to Catherine, but that idea almost seems moot.

So why did I love it?  Yeah, it gets incredibly melodramatic.  The whole last ten minutes are almost tonally different from the rest of the film.  There's something so intense about those final sequences.  But as insane as their relationship is, there's also something very human about the piece as a whole.  I don't think that Truffaut is afraid to show characters as unlikable, yet relatable.  It's hard to pull that off.  Yeah, I get frustrated with Catherine and Jim especially.  There's so much to be annoyed with, but still there is a relationship there that is fascinating.  There's also a friendship that holds up that absolutely has no reason for existing.  It's a really interesting story.  Sure, we've seen the love triangle before.  But this is a love triangle where all the rules are skewed.  It makes for a compelling story and I love where it takes me by the end. 

And gosh darn it, Truffaut is a good director.