BFI | Current Film Releases

Jules et Jim

Opens Friday 30 May

Dir: François Truffaut, Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre
France 1962, 105 mins, Cert PG

'A film which provokes the simple desire to talk about life' - François Truffaut

'What is so astonishing about the film is its freshness and vitality' - Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

The BFIs re-release of François Truffauts much loved New Wave masterpiece celebrates the 80th birthday of its star, the riveting and risk-taking Jeanne Moreau. A remarkably frank exploration of the nature of love and friendship, Jules et Jim features one of the most famous love triangles in the history of cinema.

Adapted from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules et Jim tells the story of

two aspiring writers who form a close friendship set in the bohemian Paris of 1912. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy, philosophical Austrian, while Jim (Henri Serre) is a debonair Frenchman, confident and successful with women. Both fall for the beautiful, capricious Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), but Jules is the one she chooses to marry. After the Great War - in which Jules and Jim fight on opposite sides - Jim visits his two friends and their young daughter in the Rhine Valley, but the marriage is not what it seems, and Jim soon finds himself embroiled in a complex, turbulent ménage à trois. Catherine yearns for free and passionate love, devoid of jealousy, lies and hypocrisy. As her lovers acknowledge, she is 'a vision for all men, not a woman for one.

Stylistically and psychologically rich, Jules et Jim resists conventional categorisation and offers no easy answers. Almost 50 years on, it still radiates an astonishing freshness and vitality. It also remains, in the words of the director himself, 'a film which provokes the simple desire to talk about life.

13 - 15 August