Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25124 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-08-26
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Black & White, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Special Features
Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 9
French
Region 0
Dolby Digital French
Dolby Digital
Introduction To The Film
Jeanne Moreau Audio Commentary
Original Theatrical Trailer
Francois Truffant Collection Trailers
Chapter Selection
Archival Documentary Material
English

Synopsis
JULES AND JIM is Francois Truffaut's intense, beautiful, enigmatic film about the lifelong friendship between two writers--French novelist Jim (Henri Serre) and Austrian children's author Jules (Oskar Werner)--and their mutual love for the eccentric Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). With artful black-and-white imagery, the story begins in 1920s Paris when Jules and Jim first meet and become friends. As young single men, they gallavant about Paris, chasing women or studying ancient art, always animated, curious, and charming. When they meet the equally energetic Catherine, whose impulses range from dressing up as a man to taking midnight plunges into the Seine, their circle is complete. But when World War II erupts, with Jules and Jim fighting on opposite sides, everything changes. Jules marries Catherine before going off to battle. After the war, they settle into a quiet existence in the French countryside. But Catherine is restless and unfaithful. Jim reunites with his oldest and closest friends, and Catherine makes room for him in their house, asking him to move in and become her lover. Jim complies, as he wants nothing more than to please his friend Jules, who agrees to the plan. From there, the film's sweeping photography and wonderfully philosophical scripting tightens as the tale becomes even more complicated. Even its darkest moments, JULES AND JIM is movingly alluring as the friendship between the two men paints a meaningful portrait of human understanding and compassion. Like the similarly themed TWO ENGLISH GIRLS, Truffaut's film is based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche.

Customer Reviews

Charming and entertaining film
Francois Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" is rightly regarded as one of the classic French films.Although it is in black and white and was made 43 years ago, it still has a freshness and vitality to it. It is a visionary film, portraying a very 21st Century morality in which Jeanne Moreau's capricious and passionate Catherine is the love interest for two friends, Jules and Jim . Jules and Jim are two scholarly socialites with little interest in monogamous relationships until the bewitching Catherine comes along. After Jules marries her, he soon realises that cosy domesticity is not for Catherine and their marriage quickly becomes an "open" one and his friend Jim gets drawn into a love triangle with her.

The film must have been very controversial in the 1960's as it glamourises adultery and pre-marital sex and is essentially amoral, making a mockery out of the marital institution. However it is a captivating story, well acted with strong characterisation, the music is great and the film is directed well by Truffaut. I must admit to feeling sorry for Jules and Gilberta as Moreau's turbulent Catherine ("une force du nature") causes them so much pain.Like Bardot in "Le Mepris", Moreau portrays a woman whose "me first" characteristics and morals are very much part of the zeitgeist of this decade.

Vastly over-rated
This film is a favourite with high-school classes and first-year university French classes and I think this is the main reason it is so well-known (not to be confused with popular).

The educational value of this film lies in the fact that there is no acting involved, and no emotion, cleverness, or complexity to the dialogue which is uniformly, painstakingly-well enunciated in very slow, schoolchild French.

The characters are undeveloped and they do not interact with each other beyond saying their lines to each other.

All-in-all this film has no entertainment value whatsoever, but could be good if you need to practise a very simple and limited subset of the French vocabulary.

I give the film one star for being a very accurate rendition of an incredibly bland and pointless novel.

THIS PURE TRIANGULAR LOVE
"She is the greatest sweetheart in French cinema. While gangsters and gangs kill each other, she dances in a tutu in a circus, is tortured by a sadist and makes her way through bursts of submachine-gun fire, with thoughts only of love. With trembling lips, wild hair, she ignores what others call 'morals' and lives by and for love. Messieurs, producers and directors, give her a real part and we will have a great film."

Francois Truffaut wrote this of Jeanne Moreau in 1957. Shortly afterwards, when fascination turned to friendship, the burgeoning director's greatest ambition would be to make a film with the woman who had become the most important person in his life.

In JULES ET JIM, Jeanne Moreau's is a performance of touching beauty and lucidity that is unparalleled in cinema. She is Catherine, the woman in love with life, who in turn falls in love with both Jules and Jim (superb performances from Oskar Werner and Henri Serre), amateur scholars, dandies, and the closest of friends. Over the following years, through joy, disillusionment, a world-war and parenthood, the three share a relationship that defines love itself; as Catherine alternates her pledge of devotion from Jules to Jim, and even to other men, our heroes explore a friendship that has been touched by a soul who is "not a woman" but rather "...an apparition".

But Catherine is not "fatale"- rather the very essence of woman, whose divine right it is to live as she pleases, when she pleases, where any potentially ruinous consequences are the unfortunate fruits of an unmitigated love of love itself. Truffaut's art is one that invokes the Goddess, embodied here by an enigma of extraordinary grace and power. His camera laughs with her, cries with her, and encapsulates with amazing dexterity the flow of movement - the whirlwind of life. The theme of JULES ET JIM - a triangular love affair that questions monogamy - is unhindered by any sensuality or sexual intimations. Instead it is a love that is pure, chaste and eternally resonant. The remarkable tact of Truffaut's direction, the refutation of showiness, conveys a cinema of charm and elegance, as the film's mood undulates in accordance with the whims of our great love Jeanne Moreau - from untold joy to the heavy burden that is the awful truth.

JULES ET JIM is a film of harmony and genius, a hymn to life that asks the audience not to judge, but rather to experience and to love. We can relate to the film Truffaut's own words, when, speaking of Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR and Howard Hawks' BIG SKY he said: "Anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself."