"Jules et Jim"

An excerpt from the classic 1962 French film "Jules et Jim" directed by Francois Truffaut. Fast friends Jules and Jim have recently seen and been captivated by a slide of a statue of a woman's head shown to them at another friend's house.

Narrator:
The statue was in an outdoor museum on an Adriatic island.
They set off immediately to see it.
They both had the same white suit made.
They spent an hour by the statue. It exceeded their expectations.
They walked rapidly around it in silence.
They didn't speak of it until the next day. Had they ever met such a smile?
Never.
And if they ever met it? They would follow it.
Jules and Jim returned home, full of this revelation.
Paris took them gently back in.

[In the gymnasium, where Jules - who is Austrian or German and blond - and Jim - who is a tall, skinny, mustachioed Frenchman - engage in the gayest exhibition of French boxing ever known to mankind, while some only slightly less ridiculous fencing occurs around them. They finish up and take a break against the wall.]

Jules: That's good. Is your book coming along?
Jim: Yes, I've done quite a bit. I think it'll be rather autobiographical. Our friendship will play a major role in it. I'd like to read a passage for you.
Jules: Please do.
Jim: "Jacques and Julien were inseparable. Julien's last novel had been a success. He had described, as if in a fairy tale, the women he had known before Jacques or even Lucienne. Jacques was proud for Julien's sake. People called them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and rumors circulated behind their backs about their unusual friendship. They ate together in small restaurants and each splurged on the best cigars to give the other."
Jules: It's quite beautiful. If you'd allow me, I'd like to translate it into German.
Jim: Now let's hit the showers.

[Jules and Jim bathe separately.]

Jules: My cousin just wrote me. Some girls are coming to Paris who studied with him in Munich. A girl from Berlin, one from Holland, and a French girl. They're coming to dinner tomorrow. I'm counting on you to join us.

[We see a girl come down the walkway.]

Narrator: Catherine, the French girl, had the smile of the statue on the island.
Her nose, mouth, chin, and forehead bore the nobility of a province she personified as a child in a religious celebration.
It started like a dream.

[They drink a toast to brotherhood at Jules' house while playing a strange game of footsie. Thus a love triangle begins.]

---

It is hard to fathom under what circumstances and for what occasion it would be non-insane for two men to have identical white suits made. A photo-negative gay wedding in which their bridesmaids wore black? A Fantasy Island theme party? Somehow, this seems excessive for celebrating a trip to an island to look at a statue, no matter how beautifully lipped it is.

I cannot over-emphasize the degree to which these guys made boxing look like flirtation.

It is amusing that Jim is aware of what their friendship looks like to outsiders. Is the cigar he is giving Jules just a cigar?

"Her nose, mouth, chin, and forehead bore the nobility of a province she personified as a child in a religious celebration" is arguably the single oddest sentence I have ever heard in a movie.

There is a later point in the film where the narrator tells us that Jim considers how his and Catherine's children would be tall, slender, and prone to headaches; it makes me think of Robert.

The movie is remarkable in how the dramatic subject matter is treated in a very distanced, understated way, and the inclusion of significant amounts of exposition by the narrator was unusual to me. It made more sense when I watched the interview with the director in which he explained that the film is based on an autobiographical novel written by a 70 year old man who describes the events of a distant past that no longer have the intensity they did when they occurred. The strange, sometimes lovely language was lifted directly from the book.