Jules and Jim, notes on a novel and a film Jules and Jim, the most famous love triangle of arthouse cinema, or at least the more delicate than that - thankfully - does not cover situations
Fatal Attraction and test even more difficult to tell
between male friends: that of two men who love the same woman. Before the film is, however, the novel Henry-Pierre Roche, published in France in 1953 and passed essentially unnoticed. The author made his debut on the literary scene at 74, even with a book which is defined, and is in many ways, adolescence
.
The title should have been
A amitié , and this is a signal on the deep sense of history of Roche. The novel has a quality crucial, especially in the first part: the lightness of
that the magic hand of Truffaut manages to transfer the whole movie. The story is autobiographical Roché, with himself in the part of Jim French, the writer Franz Hessel in that Jules and the beautiful Helen Grund in the novel becomes Kathe, then transformed into a more accessible Catherine in the film. The interest, however, rather than on a key play of the novel lies in
original universality of the story telling and style - quick, ironic, slightly - that the writer has chosen to tell
In this sense, the first part of the book, one in which there is no Kathe is
wonderfully happy and full of sensuality. What is striking is not the dissolution of Jules and Jim, while their peaceful Don Juan. The second part, while introducing the character of Kathe that is memorable, is artistically
weaker, perhaps because of the involvement suffers Roché's autobiographical. That brilliance of language and those short sentences that were the treasure of the first part a bit 'then you lose. Until the management, admirable, the final shock.
Truffaut discovered the book
before becoming director and fell in love because he found it "a demonstration of the impossibility of any combination of love outside the couple." The director writes: "Reading
Jules and Jim I had the feeling of being in front of an example of what the film could never do:
show two men who love the same woman without the public can make a choice between affective these characters, so is forced to love them all three to the same extent. " And Truffaut their triangle is "a pure love of three." The
syntax of Roche, which is part of the story, the film moves in short scenes interspersed with fades and other tricks "in passing" and, above all in the best footage from nouvelle vague: Jules, Jim and Catherine going to the streets Paris with her dressed as a man, the three in the sea or in the boxing gym, or even in the wonderful scene of them running
cycling along Albert ambiguous. In these moments the film, as he writes in Fernald Di Giammatteo
Dictionary masterpieces of cinema, "exudes a keen sense of freedom, which expresses a highly mobile camera capturing the joys, sorrows and pleasures of the protagonists." And the movements of the shots, sometimes abrupt and seemingly amateur, are
technical translation of the simplicity of life which is the best figure in the story of Roche. Music by Georges Delerue, almost always happy, sometimes more intimate, contribute to the atmosphere of the movie magic.
Truffaut's Jules and Jim wanted
- work that remains largely faithful to the novel by Roche, albeit with some simplification of licensing and small plot and characters - a film was not "fashionable." The model for the director were the "little film of MGM" of the mid-forties, "film - says Truffaut - the only flaw that had to be conventional, but
give a good idea of \u200b\u200ba big book of eight hundred pages, with the passing years and white hair that made their appearance . Roche's book is not long, but - thanks to a clever time management, for example, dismisses the First World War in a few lines - is the long time span that covers and, especially, the emotional arc it describes.
The film, to persons age 18 years and almost banned in Italy, was also a challenge to the morality of the time. In this sense the works of Truffaut and Roche are absolutely mirror (although the images are completely and totally modest, while the words are often more suggestive and explicit): the three main characters are not immoral,
have a different morality , but less pure. The morality of absolute love and friendship, dissolved. We could say that they are living examples of the best
relativism, the only antidote - if properly used - against all forms of fundamentalism.
Truffaut again writes: "The screenplay by Jules and Jim did not like the people. Dealers said the wife is a whore, her husband will be a grotesque character, and so on.
The challenge, for me, was that his wife commuovesse (without resorting to melodramatic means) and was not a whore, and that her husband was not ridiculous. I like to get groped on something that is not clear at the beginning. "
last remark about actors rightly celebrated Jeanne Moreau, who plays the character more complex and difficult to make good sense of constant burning pain in the apparent insouciance anarchist. "His qualities as an actress and a woman - wrote the director - Catherine made real before our eyes,
plausible, mad, extravagant, passionate , but especially adorable, that is worthy of worship." But equally significant are the interpretations of Oskar Werner, also the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451
the same Truffaut, Jules is a soft and naive first stunned and then tried, and that of Henri Serre
, chosen by the debutant actor for his resemblance to Roche, that Jim is a "tall, thin, sweet and honest." Reduced facial expressions and a bit 'rigid of the two men, who sometimes suggest
to silent cinema, runs the length of moral history, his ability to speak with delicacy of the issues even more hot.
In short: the book of Roche is an important novel, but the films of Truffaut
as a work of art surpasses because it captures the best, giving the parties more tiring and sometimes self commiseranti Text Roché. Great books become movies almost always disappointing. Books somehow smaller
think the work of Kubrick , sometimes have the power to become the masterpieces of cinema. Perhaps this is the case of Jules and Jim
.
