Jules and Jim



This is the third movie of Francois Truffaut, after Shoot the Pianist, this is also an adapted movie from a story. After the first "failure" with the Shoot the Pianist, he decides to take the risk and adapt the book of Henri-Pierre Roche.
Throughout the book one can feel through the script, without have reading the book, that the literary aspect has been highly conserved. This was one of the goals that Truffaut, and perhaps, the New Wave wanted to achieve: opting to a different kind of adaptation by respecting the original form of the story though a cinematographic approach. The spectator, without knowing that it is an adaptation, is carried away in a dreamy-like mood, with the help of the off-voice, the collage of voices and images and the music, that one might be in while reading a book, while playing on the aspects of tenderness and coarseness.
To explain the dreamy-like mood mentioned above, one might not that the movie evolves incessantly with an energy that is present throughout the movie, starting from the prologue till the walk out of Jules.
The importance of the off-voice is noted starting from the beginning of the movie describing the two men, showing Jules and Jim together. The off-voice is not used as usually in order to narrate a past or introduce a flash back in order to give simple information; it is omnipresent and plays a role in the placement of the characters and the story itself, with a highly literary expression such as "Round eyes like marbles" among many others. One must note that the importance of the off-voice is not informative but rather to give a tone carried throughout the movie
Therefore the importance of the relation, as we have seen in the Shoot the Pianist and later on with his other movie, between literature and cinema.
Catherine is before all an image of perfection projected a statue and work of art. Before meeting the incarnation of the picture and the statue Truffaut, awaits the spectator perhaps to give a sensation of a dream, fantasy, and admiration that is common is Truffaut's movies. Catherine in this perspective belongs to a different category of women, it is suggested that she is divine.
Like Catherine, the statue and the lady that does not talk at the bar, are mysteries that do not talk or that surprises every time: making the face the important element in the filming. When Catherine appears, her face, like in the filming of the statue, decomposed by a circular movement which contributes to the dreaminess and to the shifting into another dimension. She goes out of realism; she becomes again an image, in order to enter perhaps into this enigma.
We are in the same time, in the present and the past; that is given by the off-voice and the in-voice giving birth to an ambiguous time frame, giving the dynamicity, the energy of the movie. The narration of the first world war using archives pictures, mixing different types of pictures, documentary and fiction. But Truffaut gets this tonality through the autonomy of the camera that goes in a circular motion, like in the game around the table.
Like, later in his movies, Truffaut uses the medium of writing and reading letters to tell love stories between his characters that are so distant from each other, this is an movie in many it parts.
Jules and Jim is built on constant oppositions: past and present, image and reality. Intimacy and public sphere, joy and death. Perhaps to make the movie constantly in relation with the public and grasp their attention, and so creating a sort of common ground.