Menage A Truffaut | Jeanne Moreau, Henri Serre and Oskar Werner chase each other through the Parisian streets in an iconic scene from Jules and Jim
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THE 400 BLOWS / JULES AND JIM
Directed by François Truffaut. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Dec 5-9.
**** (Blows) / ***** (Jules)
As one of the pioneers of the French New Wave movement in the late 1950s, François Truffaut’s place in film history is assured. Much of his work has been given the lavish Criterion Collection treatment, and film textbooks may well never find a more concise example of directorial ambiguity than the perplexing final shot of The 400 Blows, where upstart teenager Antoine Doinel stares concertedly into the camera after escaping from prison.
But if you know him only by reputation, as I did until very recently, you’ll be pleased to know that Truffaut is first and foremost a crowd-pleaser. The two films being screened at the Metro this weekend — The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules and Jim (1962) — are positively infectious, and ache with love for their characters. They’re also directed with a laidback confidence that might be mistaken for laziness if it weren’t so damned effective.
The 400 Blows was Truffaut’s debut feature, and one of the earliest films of the movement, though many of the New Wave filmmakers, including Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, began their careers years earlier, as film critics for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Its sympathetic depiction of the neglected Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud), his struggles at school and at home, and his gradual slide into petty crime was itself something of a revelation — Rebel Without a Cause and the newfound teenage perspective were only five years old at this point — but so is the film’s style. Truffaut’s camera wanders around the scene, picking up essential details seemingly by accident, and the whole thing is loosely edited together, with zippy music and quick nods to old Hollywood providing emotional, rather than strictly technical, continuity.
It’s probably not surprising that some of this is less impressive 50 years later, as his dangerous innovations become industry standards. Nothing can dilute the thrill of seeing Antoine’s classroom erupt into a chaos of spitballs and physical impressions whenever his overbearing teacher’s back is turned (my favourite is the boy who simply stands up and starts regally waving, at nobody in particular), but a sullen teenager being shipped from holding cell to holding cell? Not as visceral and world-shattering as it might have once been — and Truffaut leans on this image for much of the third act, right up until Antoine’s exhilarating escape.
If The 400 Blows has a few minor wobbles for modern viewers, then Jules and Jim remains as smooth as silk. Oskar Werner and Henri Serre play the most affable of bachelor best friends: they share a love of literature (both are amateur writers), the theatre, the occasional kickboxing practice, and most of all Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). She initially falls for and marries the introverted Jules (Werner), but who loves whom in the trio is part of an open-ended cycle that you desperately hope will continue forever, sustained solely on its own energies like a perpetual motion machine.
The same visual tics Truffaut introduced in The 400 Blows are still there in Jules and Jim, but there’s almost no time to take in any of them; watching these three romp through Paris and the French countryside, chatting about Shakespeare or, in Catherine’s case, dressing up as a man for the hell of it, verges on a narcotic experience. At the time of its release, The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called it “one of the most beautiful films ever made, and the greatest motion picture of recent years.” Seems plausible.
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