Classic Ménage á Trois – Jules et Jim

ArSENik   | Retro | December 3, 2009 at 7:38 am         Print

Note: This post contains some spoilers!

François Truffaut once said “In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs”. This is the most succinct way to describe his 1962 classic “Jules et Jim”. As the title suggests, it is the story of the friendship between two diversely different men despite the alliteration – one is a German, the other is French; one is a hermit, the other a lover. Throw into their midst a famously moody and yet charming Catherine, and you have one of the greatest love triangles in cinematic history. A thorough analysis of the film is beyond the meager scope of this writer and so, I will only concentrate on my favorite two filmmaking aspects with regard to this film – the editing and the music.

Any film of the French New Wave, and particularly of Truffaut, boasts of editing techniques worth talking about. The film starts off with Jeanne Moreau, who plays Catherine, reciting the following lines in French over black, even though it is a while before her character Catherine is introduced.

You said ”I love you!”

and I said ”Stay!”

I nearly said ”Take me!”

but you said ”Go away!”

This describes the impending events in the story beautifully to the audience and leads into the credit sequence which shows Jules and Jim getting friendlier, along with some shots of significant characters who appear later in the film, as the credits of the appropriate actors come up. Truffaut used the voiceover, sometimes considered a risky filmmaking technique, of a narrator, not otherwise involved in the film, throughout the film. The effect creates this distance between the audience and the narrative, reminding us that we are watching a film and remaining true to one of the tenets of French New Wave cinema. Truffaut reportedly used it to sustain the richness of Henri-Pierre Roché’s language in his novel.

The opening is a fast cut montage of Jules and Jim, continuing from the credit sequence over the narration. Truffaut uses stock footage a number of times throughout the film. The first instance is in this opening sequence when Jules visits prostitutes. The other instances are later in the film when Jules and Jim are separated and have to go fight for their respective countries against one another in the First World War.

When Thérèse, a drifter who meets Jules and Jim, goes up to Jules’ apartment, the cutting is fast and gradually as the awkwardness disappears, so do the cuts. Truffaut dissolves from this fairly platonic scene to the apparent intimacy of Jim and his girl Gilberte, thus subtly presenting a contrast between the characters of the two friends. When Thérèse leaves them, the camera follows her for a while before swish-panning to our heros to allow Truffaut to hide a cut. There are some beautifully orchestrated transitions in the film, like when Jules and Jim are in neighboring showers in the boxing club and Jules tells Jim about the three women visiting him the next day. The camera does a quick tilt up and dissolves to a set of steps on which we see the three women in the next scene. Jules sings the French national anthem ‘La Marseillaise’ over the phone to Jim to prove to him that his French has improved and doesn’t retain a German accent anymore. This transitions to the war sequence. Jim writes a letter to Gilberte mentioning that he fears killing Jules inadvertently and this cuts to an explosion.

When the war is over, we hear ‘La Marseillaise’ in a non-diagenic fashion. When Catherine picks Jim up from the train station, the camera pans to the wilderness on the path as they walk, so as to transition into the tree-filled shots of Jules’ and Catherine’s cottage located in the Austrian countryside. After Catherine has just sung ‘Le Tourbillon’, the shot dissolves to the next scene – all of them on bikes and the narrator tells us that each of them wanted Catherine. After consoling Catherine, Jules is worried and sits alone in an almost dark room. This scene cuts to an unhappy misty morning as Jim leaves. In one of the later sequences in the film, Jim and Catherine communicate through letters between France and Austria, but the cutting is so seamless that it seems as if they are having a conversation in the same room. Here is an example. Jim writes and his voice tells us what he is writing. The sentence is completed by Jules, reading the letter out loud to Catherine. When Jim runs into Jules at the boxing club where they used to hang out earlier, the camera pans to the sign of the club and then dissolves to a shot of the dominos they are playing with in the next scene, again something they used to do before.

The film is sprinkled with one of Truffaut’s favorite editing devices – the still frame. We first encounter it when Jules shows Jim the comical photographs of his women back in Germany. This is used again famously when Catherine shows the guys her serious faces and finally laughs, lighting up the frame. Before Jim visits Jules, Catherine and their daughter Sabine, after the end of the war, he writes a letter to them announcing his arrival in Austria and there are two stills – one each of him and Jules in army uniforms. Truffaut also uses the still frame to capture and freeze the moment when Jim greets Jules for the first time during this trip.

One of the signs of a great director lies in his use of motivated cuts, namely edits that are warranted by the action or dialog of the characters. It is no surprise that ‘Jules et Jim’ is full of such moments of genius. When Jules and Jim watch the beautiful sculpture that captures their imagination, the narrator tells us its profound impact on them and Truffaut cuts to the next scene of the men at the location of the statue. When Jules asks Jim to spend the evening with him and Catherine, Truffaut cuts to the next scene which is them spending the evening together instead of dillydallying for Jim’s answer. When Catherine talks about her appreciation for the German writer, Truffaut cuts from her to Jules, who translates Catherine’s English for Jim, cuts back to her and then finally to a two shot of Jules and Jim. Later, when Jim visits them in Austria, Jules says “so, you won the war”. The camera swish-pans from his close up to one of Jim who replies he would rather have “won this” and the camera swish-pans back to Jules’ close up, before cutting to a close up of Catherine. When Catherine opens up to Jim, she is photographed in a long lens close up. Truffaut holds this shot till she finishes, and then moves to a wider shot to show her isolation. During the bike scene after Catherine’s singing, the narrator tells us Jim feels he is getting in Catherine’s way. The camera cuts from a close up of Jim to his POV, which is nothing but an uninteresting shot of Catherine’s back. When Jim kisses the nape of Catherine’s neck, the camera cuts from the medium two shot to a more intimate two shot close up. To show what happened on Jim’s and Catherine’s first night together, Truffaut uses a series of dissolves on Catherine’s smiling close up, before cutting to an untouched and closed book that she had requested from Jim as an excuse to invite him and then finally pans up to show it is light outside.

Later, Catherine is unsure and asks Jules if he thinks Jim loves her. Before Jules can answer, Truffaut fades to black and we see Jim showing up to meet her. The roles are reversed later, in keeping with the theme of Catherine keeping score of relationship woes, when Jim is thinking of returning to France since Catherine is nowhere to be found upon his arrival, when a knock is heard at the window. Jules and Jim look in that direction, the camera cuts to Catherine behind the closed glass window. One of my favorite scenes of the movie is the one in which Jules consoles Catherine. They are a married couple but their marriage is long over. However, what is left is a platonic affection which is acted out brilliantly by Oskar Werner, playing Jules and Jeanne Moreau, and enthrallingly captured by Truffaut. He starts out in a medium two shot, cuts to a two shot close up and finally into a two shot extreme close up as Jules kisses Catherine’s tear drenched cheeks. When Jim thinks it is all over between him and Catherine, Truffaut shows us some shots of Paris before going to Gilberte in her Parisian apartment. When Jim writes to Catherine saying they had played with life and lost after their pregnancy was unsuccessful, we go through the darkness of a Parisian tunnel. When Catherine threatens Jim with a pistol, the scene ends with a cut to the clouds, and a slow pan left showing gradually clearing clouds, as the ominous music subsides after Jim manages to snatch the pistol from Catherine.

A common theme in the editing is the showing of a connection between different characters throughout the narrative. When Jules and Jim visit the beautiful sculpture, it is cut together using several tracking shots. When Catherine is shown for the first time, the same shots are used with the same cuts. Jules and Catherine form a connection on their first meeting. Truffaut crops out everyone else including Jim from the wide shot and only shows us Jules and Catherine, before fading to black. The next scene starts with the narrator telling us that Jim disappeared from their lives for a while. When the trio hang out for the first time, Catherine cross-dresses as ‘Thomas’. This sequence is replete with tight three shots, showing their bond, interspersed only by close up of ‘Thomas’. When Catherine and Jim talk about the vitriol, it is the first time a real connection has been established between the two and Truffaut promptly switches to a longer lens. When the trio go on a vacation, the scene opens with Catherine opening a window in a big French chateau. The camera zooms out to find Jules doing the same in another part of the house. The zoom is repeated to find Jim do the same in another part. The single shot again shows the bond between the three. When they go out on foot, a very long lens is used to shoot inserts of objects found by each of them, but again Truffaut uses mise-en-scene rather than cutting the bond. Later in this same sequence, we see an insert of a male hand helping up a male leg to climb a tree. However, on the way back, when there are minute sparks between Jim and Catherine, Truffaut only cuts between close ups of the two characters. We are kept on Jim’s single to show his disappointment when Catherine encourages Jules in his marriage proposal. Next is a wide shot showing them riding together with parallel trees in the foreground. They seem free, but in fact, will be imprisoned by one another in the events to follow. The lack of cuts is also used in ironic fashion in the scene where Jules and Jim are playing dominos and Catherine is bored in the background. When Catherine slaps Jules and he merely laughs, a cut-less connection is established between the two since Catherine likes the fact that she can dominate their relationship. The three shots return when Jules, Jim and Catherine play like children in the garden. These are maintained when they go to the theater, but get wider when we realize they had differing opinions. Jules and Jim are photographed in a two shot while Catherine gets her own close up. The voiceover establishes a contrast of Jim’s feelings for her from the visuals when Catherine jumps into the water.

When Catherine picks up Jim at the train station with Sabine, a cut-less bond is established between her and Jim, as he looks on from the train. In the living room, when it is very awkward, Truffaut cuts from a wide shot to a close up of Catherine, then to one of Jim and finally to Jules and Sabine, before cutting back to the wide again. A long lens is used to show Jim and Sabine, Catherine’s daughter rolling together on the field. When Jules tells Jim that he and Catherine are no longer happily married, he seeks Jim’s support. Truffaut tracks the camera back from a close up of Jules to a two shot of Jules and Jim. When Jim is looking at Catherine’s cottage from his own, the scene starts with a cropped shot of just the cottage, before revealing the rest of the frame with Jim in it. One of the longest (time-wise) shots of the film occurs when Catherine announces to Jim “catch me” in a flirtatious manner and runs out, with Jim after her, and then they walk in the woods and talk. Another long shot, though static is when the three men in Catherine’s life – Jules, Jim and Albert, all three war veterans, talk, photographed in a tight three shot. The montage in which Jules, Jim, Catherine and Sabine go out and play in the fields starts with a mise-en-scene of tracking and panning to show the close ups of the characters. One fascinating little scene is the one in which Catherine and Jim rent out a motel room. The narrator tells us of the passionate things they embarked on, but all we see is Catherine applying cream on her face, giving the scene an almost mundane quality, as if a usual married couple is going through the motions before going to bed. The only time we see someone reading aloud the contents of their letter to someone else is when Catherine’s visage appears over a train passing through the open Austrian countryside as Jim reads her emotional letter in Gilberte’s claustrophobic Parisian apartment. This is the first time she shows her emotional side to Jim. The three shots are used again when Jim visits Jules and Catherine. However, an insert of Catherine packing her pajamas is used. We later realize this is because she intends to spend the night with Albert. In the climax of the film, Truffaut shows Jim and Catherine in a tight two shot and cuts this fast with Jules’ single and later, a single of the delighted Catherine. At the very end of the film, a very long lens close up of Jules is used to show his isolation as the narrator talks about his friendship with Jim.

There are not too many instances of jumping the line in the film. Truffaut uses it very selectively, reserving it mainly for scenes of extreme butting of heads between the characters or inner conflict. However, he also jumps the line when Jules and Jim see the photograph of the sculpture for the first time and Jim asks to see it again. After the trio visit the theater and their opinions clash, Catherine calls the men ‘a couple of fools’ and Truffaut jumps the line. This is used again soon for probably less than a second when Catherine jumps into the water. Truffaut uses jump cuts when Jim visits Austria for the first time after the end of the war and comes across a sculpture of a soldier. He fades to black after Jim visits a graveyard for war veterans. After Jim reaches Jules’ and Catherine’s cottage, Jules is showing him to his room and tells him that his marriage is over. Jules gets up from his seat and Truffaut jump cuts to him already seated on the other side. He jumps the line with them at the window as Jules tells Jim about Catherine and Albert.

Truffaut used his regular partner-in-crime Georges Delerue to score this film. There are basically three major music pieces used in the film. The first one is a blissful tune which is the trio’s theme. This is first used when they are on holiday and walk about in the wilderness with total abandon. This revisits us when Jim visits his friends and all three run around like children in their garden, and again a couple of times, when he visits them and their daughter Sabine in Austria and they get past their initial moments of awkwardness.

The second major theme is Jim’s and Catherine’s theme, which is heard a lot more than the trio’s theme. We first hear this when Jim visits Catherine alone for the first time. This plays again non-diagenically in Austria as Jim brings Catherine the book she asks for and they share their first kiss and spend the night together. This is repeated when Catherine shows up for Jim after disappearing for a while and later when they go to the motel. This plays as Jim tells her later that he understands her but wants to marry Gilberte, at which point the music takes a dangerous turn when Catherine pulls out a pistol. The climax also uses Jim’s and Catherine’s theme for obvious reasons.

Le Tourbillon

The third theme is a song actually composed for this film – ‘Le Tourbillon’, which iss sung very naturally, diagenically by Jeanne Moreau accompanied by just a guitar in my favorite scene of the movie. The trio are in Austria, in Jules’ and Catherine’s living room. Sabine and Albert are also there. Albert is strumming his guitar. The lyrics basically describe Catherine’s character. The song returns as a tune in a sequence later when Albert shows up again and finally in a brass version in the final shot of the film with Jules walking down a road alone. Apart from these three tunes, there are smaller themes like the comical score in the ‘Thomas’ sequence and the ominous music when Catherine pulls a pistol on Jim.

When this film was released in 1962, it did not receive much recognition either at Cannes or at the César awards in France. It was nominated for best film at the BAFTA and Jeanne Moreau was nominated for best foreign actress. Since then, this has become a classic of course, establishing Jeanne Moreau as a femme fatale of the era, despite her relatively ordinary looks. The film has been referenced in countless films, the most famous of them being Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s ‘Amelie’ and remade two times, but neither version is said to be anything like the original.