Can a mother love two of her children equally? At a given instance, surely not. Performing a time average over her lifetime may yield an answer that she almost loves them equally. If the same question is asked about a woman who loves two men the answer may be surprisingly close in certain cases. The ideal of loving two people equally will always elude us. But in fiction that ideal can be sculpted with utmost artistry. In Jules et Jim, Truffaut adapts Henri-Pierre Roché's autobiographical novel and gives us a version of this ideal which is undoubtedly surreal.
Jules, an Austrian, meets Jim, a Parisian, and forms a friendship where they become inseparable. In the first few minutes of the film, you feel the friendship exuding a whiff of freshness and deep honesty which makes you rethink your closest friendships. From translating the other person's novel to meeting women together, they follow the tenets of early 20th-century bohemianism to the book. Their perfect bonhomie meets its true match when they meet Catherine, the tour de force of this story.
To quote Jules, "She's a force of nature that manifests in cataclysms". Three of them form a bond that transcends any worldly idea of love or friendship. Three of them go on a trip where Jules asks her to marry him. Jim is a bit hesitant about this as he thinks Catherine is not a soul to be caged by the mundane societal norms like marriage. He thinks she is a vision for all.
Before Jim can convey his apprehensions to Catherine, the First World War breaks out and both Jules and Jim are drafted on opposing sides. Their biggest fear on the battlefield is the horrifying apprehension of killing each other. After the war, Jim visits Jules to find out that his doubts have turned true. Catherine has fallen out of love with Jules. She keeps on running away to other men but comes back to Jules. As Catherine presents her story to Jim in the most gentle manner, she makes sure Jim falls for her. Somewhere inside she knew Jim would end up loving her and vice versa.
Jules remains a mute spectator to this relationship but he warns Jim of the consequences of loving such a free spirit. In his own meek yet magnanimous way, Jules accepts this relationship on the ground that he ends up having the company of the two people he loves the most. Catherine goes down the vicious path of finding the prosaic joys of a relationship with Jim. The charming ways of Jim are not meant for providing the love which Jules could so effortlessly provide. Jules needed Catherine, Jim desired for Catherine. Catherine kept on oscillating between the two and her love made Jules and Jim understand each other better. Her presence made sure their friendship reaches surreal heights. I won't spoil the ending here, but the movie ends on this note where it places Jules and Jim's camaraderie over Catherine's love for them. Is this a patriarchial take on the story? I surely don't know the answer. The French term for a threesome is ménage à trois which translates to house of three. Jules, Jim, and Catherine surely made a home of three where these three souls found a refuge in their own honest way.
Jeanne Moreau's portrayal of Catherine is one for the textbooks. The film feeds off the lightness of her performance. To quote Camus, "We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are free and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically." For Moreau's Catherine that authenticity lies in loving someone every moment without the shackles of petty morality. The ideal form of love is so unbound that the goal would fall short of the reach. Film critic Andrew Sarris once wrote, Jules and Jim celebrates “the sweet pain of the impossible and the magnificent failure of an ideal.” I want to end this with a scene from the movie. The evening when Jules sees Catherine kissing Jim for the first time he recites a German verse and asks Catherine to translate it. With the utmost audacity and defiance that any form of honest love deserves, Catherine translates it to the following by adding the words, "O God, O God". Probably, this world needs Catherine's defiance in abundance to become the abode of the ideal.
