Jules & Jim, but not me

Contrary to the popular saying, the third time is not, I repeat, not the charm as far as it concerns Francois Truffaut's beloved film, JULES et JIM, and myself. JULES & JIM reveals a decades long friendship between the German-born Jules (Oskar Werner) and his bff French-born Jim (Henri Serre). Intervening in that friendship is a woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) who eventually marries Jules and has his child, but then begins sleeping with Jim- with the blessing of Jules who doesn't want to lose Catherine completely. This emotionally torturous menage-a-trois is made all the more difficult because Truffaut 'emotionally retards' the Jules character and creates an idyllic scenerio that betrays real human emotions. Even if we concede that Jules was so deeply in love with Catherine and so deeply in friendship with Jim that he would condone their love affair, the emotional torment that Catherine sends Jules through time and time again (e.g. various affairs and adventures with mutual friends, disappearances for months at a time) would drive even the most devoted man to madness. Yet, in keeping with a thematic trait I noticed in all of Truffaut's work (from the short film LES MISTONS through LES QUATRE CENT COUPS (The 400 Hundred Blows) and TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE -Shoot the Piano Player) Truffaut's male characters are emotionally stunted individuals who are either unwilling or unable make the leap into maturity as it concerns their relationships with the women in their lives. While this thematic trait was endearing in his films of adolescence like LES MISTONS and certainly in his masterpiece LES QUATRE CENT COUPS it reaches its apex in TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE. After TIREZ this thematic trait becomes a disturbing form of masochistic torture that pushes the story within his films into a 'no-man's land' of emotional incredulity. What I mean by that specifically is that in JULES et JIM the breakdown of the menage-a-trois is inevitably going to be based on jealousy. Jealousy is a real human emotion; it cannot be avoided. It can be concluded but it cannot be avoided. The real conflict within JULES et JIM is within the character of Jules, himself. He is either unwilling or unable to come to terms with his emotional dependancy upon Catherine no matter how much she humilates him. This emotional stunting of the Jules character is what inevitably makes us judge him as pathetic. An alternate way to have saved this story and the character would have been to include an emotionally explicit scene with all three of the characters in bed together. Unfortunately as we have it JULES et JIM is a flawed work of insufferable timidity and masochicism. At the end of the film Jules has nothing but his memories to live with and I'm sure he would have a difficult time with the guilt. Were it not for Raoul Coutard's transcendent cinematography (the film is littered with extraordinary visual sequences composed with dynamism far beyond when it was made) and the seductive music of Georges Delerue I don't think I could have sat through this film a third time. After his characters go beyond adolescence I just don't believe that Truffaut could ever hit the right emotional note... and yet maybe in giving us such a sustained portrait of male emotional stunting he was both confessing to us and warning us. Perhaps I will see this film a fourth time.