Coorabell Hall Film Club
Wednesday 2 July

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

JULES & JIM (1962)

In 1955, when he was a 23-year-old film critic, François Truffaut read an autobiographical first novel by a 74-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I will make Jules and Jim.” Six years later – after constantly rereading and even partly memorising Roché’s novel – he more than redeemed that promise. Sixties audiences didn’t merely see his movie. They wanted to live it.

Although the film is named for the men, its animating force is Catherine, a woman both utterly timeless (Jules and Jim first see her image in a photo of a Greek statue) and forever changing: at different points, she plays the roles of Charlie Chaplin and street tough, vamp and doting mother. Passionate and iconoclastic, she is, in fact, the only true free spirit among them. Just as the men put their talent into their art, so she puts her genius into living – or perhaps into claiming for herself the reckless male freedoms that women had been traditionally denied. Time and again, she literally dresses herself in the garb of masculinity.

From the beginning, the film itself was treated as a magnificent success, with Truffaut winning praise from such personal heroes as Jean Cocteau and Jean Renoir. Truffaut was not yet thirty when he made this tale of triangular desire, and decades later it’s still astonishing that one so youthful could be so open-hearted, so willing to give everyone’s motives and passions their due.

Almost every scene is shot with a casual stylistic brilliance. Yet what audiences have always loved about this movie isn’t simply its technical brilliance but its emotional warmth, its embrace of a world in which tragedy is forever playing hopscotch with farce. It is a movie that enters viewers’ lives like a lover – a masterpiece you can really get a crush on.