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Summary: To whoever said "don't spoil the ending" - THANK YOU
Review: I've not seen this film, but it was recommended so I did my usual read through the Amazon reviews (a great resource in my opinion!). Well I got to one which criticised another reviewer for revealing the ending and luckily I just turned away and closed the page. Now I won't be able to read the rest of the reviews until after I've seen the film. So - THANK YOU to the person who warned me, you may have saved me from having a good film spoiled. To the person who revealed the plot - PLEASE don't do it again! Amazon even warn you not to do this in their review guidelines, and it obviously can totally ruin a more plot-based film (especially ones with a twist in the tale) for those who've never seen it. Ok, I'm sure you didn't do it deliberately, but please try to avoid this in future - you can review a film without revealing all the important plot lines. Just give an overview of the plot, then talk about what makes the film good, but keep it vague enough so people can discover the film for themselves! P.S. AMAZON GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER. What is the point of having reviews submitted, then waiting 24 hours to put them up, but letting people totally ruin a film's suspense by giving away the plot? Either print reviews up immediately, or have them vetted. And each review should have a button next to it saying "if this review has spoilers, click here to notify Amazon and we will vet the review". That way you don't have to check 1000s of reviews a day, but the obvious giveaway ones will get brought to your attention. How about it?
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Summary: This isn't for everyone, just the cool people...
Review: If you're looking for one of the greatest love stories of all time, buy Gone With the Wind. If you are one of the chosen few who don't require a happy ending to appreciate a fine story, buy this DVD now!
For anyone who likes fine French cinema, this is one of the more influential titles out there. Case-in-point: have you ever seen the original video to Sixpence None The Richer's "Kiss Me?" I'm not talking about the movie soundtrack version; I'm talking about the ingenious, brilliant one which took place in France. The race between two of the guys in the group on the bridge (forgive me for not knowing their names) is taken directly from this movie.
If you understand that there is virtue in appreciating a bitter-ending story (and with a love triangle as maddening as this, how could it be anything less?) you will consider this movie a great work of art. To the uninitiated in the world of foreign films, this is a great first step into a fascinating world where layers and layers of symbolism will add depth to your viewing enjoyment.
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Summary: the philosophical heart of this movie...
Review: is merde. this movie is merde. you will pray for demons to eat your eyeballs and erase your memory with pain in the hope that you will forget this, the most truly unforgettable of movies. unforgettable because it is terrible. so terrible that you might consider killing yourself, it is really that bad. i'm writing this for one purpose only: not to sound cool, not to elicit laughter, not for anything other than the simple fact that i hope to save you from the time you will waste if you happen to think 'oh cool, a french film by truffaut' and watch this movie. if you do watch it, you will remember my warning clearly while you are on your deathbed because of all the wasted time that you will have accrued in your lifetime watching this will be the time that you would want back most of all. if you consider watching this because you can't believe that this could be this bad, you're wrong and stupid and should eat glass.
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Summary: A meditation on freedom
Review: It doesn't suprise me that at least a 1/4 of the reviews here are from people who cannot understand why this movie is so beloved. Most people these days watch movies as spectacle. This film will give back whatever you invest in it. If you invest nothing, you get nothing.As I've gotten older, this movie has become more and more emotional for me. The characters briefly live out a kind of reckless and carefree nirvana. They then spend the rest of the film trying to recreate the feeling. But as time goes on, entanglements creep in. Children are born. Wedding vows are taken. Friendships are tested. Which of us over 30 cannot relate to this? The last line of the film, a seemingly tacked on detail about a request made to a civil servant, sums all that has come before with pure poetry. A final plea for freedom is made, but..."it was not to be permitted".
Rating: 
Summary: Images superbes, son excellent
Review: Je trouve ce DVD excellent pour la qualité des images ainsi que le son qui est très bon. La performance de Jeanne Moreau est magnifique, elle rend le personnage vivant et vrai, on y croit. Il n'y a qu'une chose que moi personnellement, je n'aime pas, c'est l'histoire elle-même que je trouve tout-à-fait immorale et indécente : où va notre société avec des manières de vivre, une philosophie de la vie aussi "libertine". C'est mon opinion, qu'on en pense ce qu'on voudra.
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Summary: One of the Sexist Films Ever Made
Review: Jules (Oscar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) are two young men, the former German, the latter French, who meet and become bosom friends in pre-First-World-War Paris. Jules, the more serious and reflective of the two is also less experienced with women and has a hard time maintaining long term relationships. An artist friend Albert shows them a photograph of an ancient statue and they fall in love with it, its smile in particular, impulsively travelling at once to the Adriatic to look at the original. Then they meet the proud and impulsive Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), who carries a bottle of vitriol around with her as a provision against the eventualities of masculine perfidy, in whom they recognize the same fateful smile. Jules falls in love and they are soon engaged. But Catherine has feelings for Jim too and arranges, for motives left purposefully ambivalent, to meet him in a café before accepting Jules' proposal. She is late and the meeting never takes place. If it had, well, we are left to guess. In any event off she goes to Germany with Jules. Then, for a while the friends are separated by the War and Jim too becomes engaged to his Parisian lover Gilberte. But peace brings them back together in an increasingly complex relationship that is not so much a tangled romantic triangle as a romantic pentagon with the unfortunate Gilberte and Catherine's occasional lover Albert complicating matters around the edges.
This is a glorious, rich sensual film, full of an enormous exuberant energy breathtakingly paced. It's a richly witty comedy about loss, betrayal, infidelity and death though the brilliant comic elements fade as the film nears its end and the plot darkens. Completely lacking in nudity or sex scenes, it's one of the sexiest films in existence not least due to the presence of two of the sexiest actresses in film history, Jeanne Moreau in the lead as Catherine and Marie Dubois (the star of `Shoot the Pianist') in a supporting role as a flighty adventuress with whom Jules has a fleeting erotic encounter early on. Beneath the wit there is a highly complicated and in many ways very dark study in sexual politics. Brilliantly directed and beautifully shot, it's one of the great French movies, indeed one of the great movies.
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Summary: Francois Truffaut has done it again!!!
Review: Now I must say for the record that it took me three times to see how beautiful and poetic "Jules and Jim" really is. When I first saw it, I found it be be a complete bore, and the voice over narration was the worst I've ever witnessed. The second time I viewed it, I began to get a bit comfy with the narration, and Truffaut's style that celebrates cinema yet at the same time re-inventing it. But Jeanne Moreau's spoiled Catherine really made me hate the movie all over again.
But it wasn't until recently when I saw another simular move, Y Tu Mamá También (which in some sense is the gen-x mexican version of Jules and Jim) is when I started to appericate Truffaut's love he brought to the film. Yes, when you first see this movie the voice over narration will get on your nerves, but I think I understand what Truffaut was aiming for. See, like his rival, Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut tried to do things differently than what the Hollywood films -- which he loved and adored -- did earlier. The whole purpose of the French New Wave was to do something entirely different -- something more radical. So when it comes to the voice over narration, it made me admire it, the same how I admire Jean-Luc Godard's rapid jump-cutting and his way of slowing down a movie and having his characters discuss philsophical topics.
Jeanne Moreau has every right to be called one of the greatest actresses in cinema history, cause she's just so damn good at being impassive, shallow, spoiled, smart, powerful, demanding, yet still making you care for her. Not too many actresses could make you care about a jaded character like Catherine, yet its always the flawed characters in a film that makes it interesting. Her character sort of reminds me of what Pauline Keal said about the characters in "L'Avventura", "they are people trying to escape their boredom by reaching out to one another and finding only boredom once again.''
So I must tell the people who really detest this movie, try to watch it again, realize how radical yet tame Truffaut was with his direction; how Jeanne Moreau's Catherine is a wealthy woman, where money allowed her to clear away the distractions of work, responsibility, goals and purposes, and exposed the utter emptiness within.
Now I truly understand why critics feel Jules and Jim, along with Breathless, changed cinema forever. A classic film!
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Summary: Catherine: mad, bad, and dangerous to know
Review: OK, it's an interesting film. The black and white works very well spliced into old newsreel footage. The acting on everyone's part is excellent. It's a good recreation of the period (circa 1910 up to about 1920). If you want to watch French film to practice your language skills, it's not a bad choice because part of the period work is to have the character speaking French that was more formal and thus closer to textbook French than in most contemporary films. But I grew to hate Catherine so much I wanted to throw things at my television. She is one of those women who ensnare, chew up, and spit out nice guys so that these men end up so neurotic and bitter that even if they live through the experience they're ruined for anyone else. Some girlfriend (not that women like this usually have real female friends) should have taken her out for a tea in a crowded cafe and slipped something slow-acting but lethal into her tea. Goodness,Monsieur le agent, you mean someone poisoned dear Catherine? I simply can't believe it! She was such an angel, my dearest friend. The waiters were so terribly busy. Are you sure it wasn't an accident in the kitchen?
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating classic French New Wave film from Truffaut
Review: Other than seeing him in Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, I have never been much acquainted with the films of much-acclaimed French New Wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut. Recently, though, I decided to try one of his most famous films, JULES AND JIM, and, for the most part, I was not disappointed by it. Having seen Jean-Luc Godard's seminal BREATHLESS just recently on DVD, I was able to appreciate some of the similarities in style between the two films. The first half of JULES AND JIM, especially, is full of technical wizardry: Truffaut not only uses Godard's pioneering jump-cut technique, but also uses the occasional freeze fame to emphasize particular small moments (like Jeanne Moreau's facial expressions at one point), plays with his film's aspect ratio (filmed in 2.35:1 widescreen Franscope by Raoul Coutard, who also did similarly distinguished work in BREATHLESS) and even interspersing WWI newsreel footage into the film, in the manner of Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. But, as with all great filmmakers, all of this technique is not merely the empty stylings of a virtuoso visual artist. Not only does the technique bring a fascinating alive-ness to the picture; it emphasizes the joy in the lives of the three main characters before WWI and its sad aftermath set in.
Truffaut's characters are also fascinating to watch, their situations equally so. Here is a romantic triangle like no other I've ever seen, but the focus isn't necessarily on the two men who love the same woman. As the Amazon.com editorial review suggests, the film may be named after its two main male characters, but it really belongs to Catherine, the self-proclaimed "free spirit" female who is loved by almost every man she meets and yet never feels the need to settle with just one. She is a powerful and fascinatingly enigmatic character, indeed "ultimately unknowable." Yet what spirit we notice when we first see her onscreen! Who wouldn't be resisted by her adventurousness and sheer energy at first, especially the way Jeanne Moreau irresistibly plays her? And then we see how manipulative and restless she can really be, and we start to feel a little sympathy toward the gentle man who married her, Jules: this is perhaps the first woman he has truly admired and loved, and now that he has gotten her, he desperately wants to hold on to her, even going so far as to put up with her cheating ways. Jim, of course, feels a bit of jealousy when Jules marries her, but he keeps it to himself, as a good friend must...until Jules allows him to carry on an affair with her. Even then, though, she becomes unhappy with Jim when she cannot conceive of a child. All of these threads converge into an ending that is both shockingly sudden and lyrically poetic; you'll understand Jules' feeling of "relief" after the film is over, and perhaps you'll likely echo it yourself, after having watched these characters live the way they have.
The central performances are all first-rate. Oskar Werner and Henri Serre as Jules and Jim both exhibit convincing chemistry at the beginning of the film: you can tell they've been good friends for a long time. As the film progresses, though, Werner truly stands out as the long-suffering Jules: he draws you into his ambivalent, complicated feelings toward Catherine, and easily earns some audience sympathy. And Jeanne Moreau truly brings Catherine, the real protagonist of the film, to vivid life. She is always convincingly in character, and never makes Catherine's actions feel lightweight or inconsequential, like some other less-skilled movie stars might do.
I found the narration of the movie kind of a distraction at times. Voice-over narration can be convincing in some movies (the recent SEABISCUIT used it quite effectively, I think), but in JULES AND JIM I find it a bit too explanatory of characters' emotions, too much of a narrative shortcut---in short, perhaps a bit of laziness on Truffaut's part. If less was merely explained and more was suggested by visual means, the film might seem more like a real film, less like a filmed novel, with passages being quoted from it verbatim.
In the end, though, that blemish is a comparatively small one, one that doesn't diminish the lyricism and beauty of this film significantly. JULES AND JIM remains a magnificent achievement from the French New Wave, a fascinating, emotionally complex, and above all human film about a woman whose attempts at being in control of her life slowly takes its toll on the lives of the two others who love her so. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Screen Sparkle
Review: So much has been said already about this jewel of the French New Wave. This is my second time around with Jules and Jim, and this time I listened to the commentary. Apparently François Truffaut was a film critic and then he put his ideas onto film. His style resembled the romantic fashion of French novelists. "He filmed with a pen" was the commentator's suggestion. If this movie told a linear story line of a lovers triangle as in so many inferior movies, it would not intrigue, but Truffaut attempts nothing less than to explain the nature of romantic desire or the meaning of life, whichever comes first.
Jeanne Moreau is the queen of all women in this film and the men love her, idealize her, and acknowledge her superiority over all womanhood. The boys meet this young coquette and she dresses as a boy. Jim paints a mustache on her lip and Jules and Jim chase here across a platform bridge. This is filmed from behind and along side of Moreau. These are signature takes of French Cinema, unique, original, and never to be forgotten. Moreau is indeed lifted up in youthful splendor. She is not the most beautiful woman ever says Jules, but she is the woman. I'm paraphrasing, but as the three grow older, they are trapped in Katherine's insane web of female art.
The ticket purchasing public has rejected black and white cinematography late in the 20th Century. Once, the silver screen glowed with light and shadow. Black and White makes bad actors seem competent and great actors and actresses magnificent. Truffaut borrowed the cinematographer from Goddard, I can't recall his name, but this fellow makes the screen sparkle. There were two fog scenes towards the end of the movie, which are incredible mood enhancers. In truth, this film is a sad story, but it is beautiful sadness, a plate of light cuisine that is remembered fondly forever.
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