I don't understand why this film gains in popularity, and not infamy, as the years go by. Jules et Jim is all that is bad in French cinema. It's a deeply sentimental film, relying on the clichés of emotional and philosophical depth instead creating new pathways to them. Fuzzy lenses, grassy fields, dancing in the streets of Paris, love torn asunder by war. It's the stuff of The English Patient--all the tools of greatness and depth, but essentially lacking in insight. As Herzog would say, cinematic tourism.
Jules et Jim doesn't seem to comment in any real or important way upon monogamy, friendship, sexual difference, anything. Jules and Jim are indecisive, selfish protagonists in the great French existentialist tradition--when you don't know what to do with yourself, or find yourself somehow lacking, you have sex with the type of woman you want to be. Poor Jean Moreau is not a woman; she's a hurricane of potential existential and libidinal delights.
Jules and Jim are not passionate; they're sad and childish. Witness how they're so pacified by Moreau's rendition of the saccharine-sweet lullaby "Le Tourbillon."
Jules et Jim doesn't seem to comment in any real or important way upon monogamy, friendship, sexual difference, anything. Jules and Jim are indecisive, selfish protagonists in the great French existentialist tradition--when you don't know what to do with yourself, or find yourself somehow lacking, you have sex with the type of woman you want to be. Poor Jean Moreau is not a woman; she's a hurricane of potential existential and libidinal delights.
Jules and Jim are not passionate; they're sad and childish. Witness how they're so pacified by Moreau's rendition of the saccharine-sweet lullaby "Le Tourbillon."