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"Jim et Jules, alors?" "Non, Jules et Jim!" Pure speed à la Welles or Guitry in the opening movement, gags galore, the anarchist's helper (Marie Dubois) luxuriates in her brief spotlight with cyclonic patter and cigarette trick. The Austrian biologist (Oskar Werner) and the French writer (Henri Serre) in Bohemian Paris, perpetually in motion until suddenly thunderstruck by the smile of an Adriatic statue in a friend's slide show, readily recognized as that of the capricious jolie laide (Jeanne Moreau). "A couple is not ideal," thus triangular fluctuations from 1912 to 1933. (Nazi book-burning gives a foretaste of Fahrenheit 451.) L'amour et la mort... François Truffaut on the Renoirian wandering Cupid, a jazzy pile-up of Noël Coward and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë. The heroine is generous, impulsive, monstrous—elated after catching "the new Swedish play," she interrupts her pontificating companions with a leap into the Seine. The Great War separates the characters (and allows the director to stretch grainy trench footage through modern lenses), the reunion takes place in a cabin by the Rhine. Marriage and motherhood can't tame the adventuress, at home like "a queen ready to flee." The husband studies insects and is complimented on his "Buddhist side," the lover is summoned with a borrowed Goethe tome, both listen raptly to the Muse singing "Le Tourbillon": "It's too good for them, but they're our only audience." Allegro to adagio, the hyperactive carousel that slows down to better appreciate the squeak of a rocking chair. Freeze-frames and dissolves, frames packed and jangled, joyously gratuitous aerial shots. Moreau assoluta, variously connected to water and fire and with a volatile credo of love ("short but constantly recurring"), contemplated by Truffaut with awe and terror. Preminger's Angel Face for the plunging automobile at the end, "das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan." Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. With Vanna Urbino, Serge Rezvani, Sabine Haudepin, and the voice of Michel Subor. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |