In the early 1960s, François Truffaut had already declared war on the traditionalism of French cinema, with the declaration that officially opened the doors of art history to the Nouvelle Vague. As a critic, he had denounced the easy path of cinematic Frenchness, which, by copying the commercial formula from the other side of the Atlantic, was selling its own culture through the 7th art. As a creator, however, he had to find that story he could tell in his own way, focusing his contribution on cinematic narration.
The search for the story one will tell is a complex affair; however, among all the stories and characters, Truffaut was fortunate enough to come across a ready-made story, which he utilized to create the film Jules et Jim, first shown in 1962. Where one can find such stories is, beyond complex, also random and not at all deterministic. Thus, the story the film narrates was written in a book that “fell hand in hand” into Truffaut’s hands. The book was the memoirs of a German who lived through the first half of the 20th century and at some point found himself in a peculiar love triangle (or polygon) during the pre-war and inter-war period. This was the story that Truffaut told in the movie, but it is only the foundation on which he built an artistic masterpiece.
The psychological realism of the Nouvelle Vague found fertile ground to flourish upon this unusual love story, even by the standards of French aristocracy. Society’s gaze is almost absent, as even when it is mentioned, it is more to remind us that the story has a time and place, rather than to engage more with it. The rapid narration in the third person “centers” the protagonists and their psychological makeup, while the cinematography shows the surface, their external shell. Revisiting elements of classic theater, either from antiquity or Shakespeare, Truffaut places his characters on the altar of tragic narrative, using, however, the realism of his era, which positions the viewer both alongside and within the conditions of the heroes’ torments.
The heroes do not have evident characteristics that justify their tragedy – unlike, for example, tertiary characters in the movie, such as Thérèse, a young presence who lives away from emotional commitment. At many points, they display “nobility of spirit” for their own reasons, perhaps even challenging parts of more fundamentalist societies of the era (not the Parisian one, though, which might have been more progressive than in our days). However, this “nobility of spirit” makes the heroes vulnerable and essentially serves as the keyhole through which we can look – through cinematic narration – into their souls. The grand dilemmas of the tragic heroes of classical theatre are replaced by decisions that do not seem obvious, thus bringing a new perspective even to the accepted social conventions of human relationships.
The end of the heroes is tragic; they cannot escape their demons, nor can they create the paradise they might dream of as being possible and capable of accommodating their unusual desires. In the end, the viewer has received a solid dose of introspection, but along with it, they have walked the same difficult line on the path of social evolution that, depending on the place and time, can position oneself ahead or behind the heroes of an eccentric love story.
