Jules and Jim

"I'll put a f** in my mouth when I think of you."

It’s one you’re supposed to see, one that you should be embarrassed if you haven’t seen it, and its fingerprints are more than evident all over many films made since. If you don’t come out of Jules and Jim loving it, you feel a little guilty, knowing as you do that it’s a classic Truffaut film that broke rules when it was made and has been loved ever since by filmmakers who love to pay homage to it. It feels rather like watching a Fellini film, strikingly, at least in terms of dialogue. It’s non-stop, such that a non-French speaker is frustrated with the knowledge of how much s/he is missing visually just in order to keep up on the subtitles. Even the narration is break-neck and cuts out only long enough for the characters to ramble with an urgency almost never seen in their actions. Morally loose and laid back in lifestyle, Jules, Jim, and Catherine represent a very restricted variety of characters. (Is that a paradox or just a contradiction?)

One of many views

That it is entitled Jules and Jim is apropos, since the lady Catherine is essentially the tennis ball in the match between the players; although a willful tennis ball she certainly is. This is no Broken Blossoms, however. Catherine is not victimized, though she be idealized. No one exactly is a power-holder in the film; if anyone is, it’s Catherine, by virtue of being such a fascinating object. But her own spirit of perpetual discontent prevents her from taking the sort of action that could give her more than a simply erotic hold over the men/boys. Jules is the German romantic, the pathetic Catherine-addict who would sooner see his best friend bed his own wife than be “separated” from her. (What else could separation entail?) Jim is the woman-addict who idealizes Catherine as much because she’s a woman as that she’s Jules’ woman (most of the time). An obvious homoerotic relationship is evident between the two males, but once again it’s the kind that demands the presence of or desire for a woman to keep it alive. It’s not a simple case of male repression or whatever they insist on calling it. Isn’t it possible (though a bit twisted) that two friends express their affection for one another most fully through a female proxy? The not-so-novel notion of polygamy, in this picture, finally makes an ounce of sense: instead of many women for a man, let’s be honest, many men for a woman might be more realistic.

The boys

Every imaginable cinematic toy is used to its fullest here, to a degree that Truffaut seems to be goofing off technically and formally as much as Godard tended to goof off with his content (Band of Outsiders, e.g.). The theory seems to have been, let’s start over by overwhelming the audience with every little cinematographical tool that’s ever existed; let’s make them dizzy and punish them a little for loving movies. Truffaut really seems to be daring his audience to love film as much as he does. Fitting, then, that films like Vanilla Sky and, oh, everything Wes Anderson has ever done contains some kind of nod to Jules and Jim. It’s not the tragic French New Wave film that 400 Blows is, and it isn’t the fun jaunt in the city and the snow that Shoot the Piano Player is. There’s plenty more to it than can realistically be explored here, however, and plenty more than can be gleaned in a single viewing.

Never-before-seen footage

She's a blur

Queen of her domain

Bored

A different war

Threesome + one

Wouldn't be the New Wave without one

Backatcha

Walkaway

Shoot the Piano Player

Shoot the Piano Player should not be so playful for being made by a man who had been a critic before he made it. The attitude of critics nowadays is anything but playful, but rather serious and pretentious, intellectually insecure and arrogantly taking it out on people clearly more creative than they. Which critic can honestly say s/he would rather write about art, music, literature, than create it? Francois Truffaut and all his cronies didn’t take any of their endeavors, critical or artistic, with too much seriousness, and so everything they did was all the better for it.

Guts

A banal sashay

The Pee-Wee/Pepe-le-Pew main character of this film pulls off that kind of complacent zest for life that French New Wave characters embodied so well, perhaps especially Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Pierre Léaud. This guy, apparently really a musician and not an actor, must have been the inspiration for the health inspector (of course also French) in Ratatouille, with those apathetic eyebrows and protruding lower lip, with a stature that immediately makes you both feel sorry for him and kind of despise him. This film’s willingness to take periodic breaks from its narrative is, of course, directly related to the film noir genre of cinema that it loves so well. It isn’t that these breaks never took place in the Bogart films, but that they were significantly shorter, usually no more than a comment or gesture on the part of a character. But here, when a chase scene is interrupted with a brief discussion about the banalities and profundities of life, it’s refreshing, isn’t it?

Narrative/character shift

Metronome: keeping time

Still, as with so many of these nouvelle vague films, there is a cruel insistence on the darker side of things. Death always coexists with the playfulness, not so much interrupting the party as joining it. It only ever feels out of place, like in Shoot the Piano Player or Pierrot Le Fou, when you stop and think about it. From the film’s perspective, it’s quite natural, almost a given that things would end this way. Perhaps in this way death isn’t so much treated as a “real” thing but as the cinematic convention it has become. All the conventions from film history are in these French films; they’re just tweaked and warped, rearranged to rip them out of conventional status and into a new one. If, as Tom Petty has insisted, Chuck Berry wrote the only three rock and roll songs there ever were and the others have all ripped off those, perhaps the only three films were made long before the French New Wave, and this movement was the Tom Petty of film movements, admitting finally that they weren’t original, so why not just have fun with it?

Like in the movies

Not like in the movies

Headlining the classics

Ready aim fire

Unfriendly squeeze

A New Wave ending

The 400 Blows

Opening credit shots moving via car through streets of Paris – front view, then side, with Eiffel Tower as point of focus, though usually hidden behind buildings. Point of view of passenger (child – back seat) looking out window. Then looks through back window at tower.

Great flat shot, horizontally moving, from front of class, side to side as teacher walks across back of room. Light, floaty camera – moves a lot in numerous ways and directions.

Teacher teaches students verb moods through boy’s action: “I deface the classroom wall.” Antoine goes home to write it out as all children did in class. Teacher not only aggravates children, but essentially encourages misbehavior in them. Mother yells at boy for doing homework – time to eat. Father encourages behavior (ask mother if dishrag is on fire). Mother nags constantly.

All action is focused on Antoine – everything revolves around him and relates to him. In morning, Antoine hears teacher telling him to deface classroom walls. Father reveals mother uses money for her own purposes (like Antoine), instead of buying bedding for Antoine.

Self-conscious cinema? (Boys go into theater, camera moves up and in on “CINE”. Antoine moves up wall on spinning ride – almost upside down – while people spin outside from his perspective.

Antoine sees mother kissing man in the street; camera trained on Antoine, who soon thereafter tells teacher his mother is dead. Camera does whatever it takes to keep Antoine in its sights: bird’s eye, following, turning, back & forth, panning. Antoine reads Balzac while smoking – a man’s voice is audible from within Antoine’s head. He goes from lying about his mother’s death to writing a “true “story about his grandfather’s, though he is punished for plagiarizing Balzac.

Musical montage of Antoine & friend running around – an influence of W. Anderson. Camera watches boys watching screen in theater. At kiddie puppet show, Antoine & friend in back, smoking, looking much older than other children – distinguished between other children. Also an influence on Anderson protagonists.

Police looks straight at camera while telling Antoine’s father of his typewriter theft. Once in jail, camera pulls away from Antoine, showing larger context of boy in prison. In cell, in transport, multiple shots of Antoine behind bars, from inside and out, as Antoine is manhandled. No shot of psychiatrist as Antoine is interrogated. He enjoys interrogation. RUNS away.

360-degree turn, from Antoine running, to landscape, to Antoine. Cut. Runs down stairs to beach. Continual (& continuous) shot of Antoine, running into water. Stops after getting wet, he looks straight at camera, FIN.