Jules et Jim

Tonight I finally watched Jules and Jim again for the first time in many years, and it made me angry. I'm not sure why, but there's something about the romanticization of inconstancy that I find disturbing. Jeanne Moreau is, of course, riveting, mostly, and the film is beautifully made. It's just that I can't shake the feeling that what is being portrayed as a great force of nature – the essence of Moreau's character as "une vrai femme" -- is really a powerful but unsteady egotism, enormous grace and charm coupled with an inability to conceive of the reality of other people, or at least to share in mutual reality. In its place there is the lightning of desire in an oversimplified context of defiance against hypocrisy. There is something false about the whole business, as if the movie wants to celebrate the (ostensible) freedom of la belle Catherine and to do so it must attribute the human damage she causes to some grand sort of fate, not ordinary consequence, and the failure and the damage is made to seem mysteriously inevitable. Worse yet, by identifying her as an elemental power and attributing this to her absolute femininity, the film is misogynistic. That is, it implies that the ultimate nature of woman is beyond reason, beyond morality.

And yet Truffaut does it all so beautifully that it seems to undercut the negative part, the pain and waste of what happens to people. Still, smiling cruelty is cruelty. Sorry for ranting. I wanted to like the movie, and I did to a large extent, but it bothered me, too.