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Some critics of Francois Truffaut’s 1962 film, Jules et Jim have argued that the film’s central character, Catherine (brought to life by the incomparable Jeanne Moreau), is an impulsive and unpredictable force of nature. You cannot anticipate what she will do, and perhaps that’s why she is so enchanting to her male friends. Though there is something to this idea, I think there are too many patterns in her behaviour to it off as completely random. To the audience, she is not enchanting because she is impulsive, but rather because she is very human. Though we do not always know her motivations, her actions still make sense.

Jules et Jim is about the ménage à trois relationship between the title characters and the wildly impulsive Catherine, the woman they both love. Early in the film, Catherine is preparing for a trip with the titular heroes, Jules and Jim, and decides to burn ‘lies’ in her life, placing a handful of letters on the floor and sets them alight. At first it’s puzzling, but the next object that Truffaut’s camera highlights is a bottle of sulphuric acid, which Catherine intends to throw into the eyes of men who lie. In part, this foreshadows Catherine’s poisonous nature in her relationship, but watching the film again, it strikes me as a pivotal moment. It’s a hint at her previous relationships with men but it is also a hint at her failed previous relationships, at the betrayals and dishonesties she has encountered in the past. Though the film offers no concrete answers, the acid bottle leads us to speculate that it is Catherine’s romantic past that has led to her desire to change her approach to relationships, taking charge instead of being pushed around.

What Catherine seeks from her relationships, always remains unclear. Perhaps she herself is unsure what it is she needs and wants from the men she falls in love with, and who fall in love with her. She does have a need to exercise a huge amount of control over their lives, though, and cannot abide the idea that they would not be faithful to her. On the surface, there is almost a sociopath nature to her love affairs; she doesn’t seem caring or emotionally in tune with her partner’s needs and even her own responses seem cold and uninvolved. In this film, love seems more a thrilling exercise of her than anything else.

This ties into her subversive attitude towards gender, particularly to the ways in which she is tempted to live like a man, maybe even as a man. During the formative stages of their growing friendship, the three spend an inordinate amount of time together and among other things, Catherine dresses as a man one evening to enjoy a night on the town. Though charming and fun, when she is disguised as her alter-ego, Thomas, we feel the temptation of posing as a male. When a man asks her for a light, clearly believing her to be a fellow male, we see a moment of realization, a look of wonder on her face that she can pass herself off in a completely different identity, as the wheels turn in her head. This scene is followed by what I think is another pivotal moment in her development when all three characters go to a play by a “Swede”, probably Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House from internal descriptions ¹. The central character of the drama, Nora, is a wife who is treated as a play thing by her husband and her father. Their love for her is conditional, but she is expected to behave and think according to their expectations. Catherine is touched by Nora’s plight, but Jules and Jim are very dismissive. Jules, in particular, harps on how ridiculous it is to see a woman who is unfaithful: in his eyes only a man has that luxury. They exaggerate what happens, and dismiss the very aspects of the play that Catherine was so moved by. It is perhaps the only scene in the film where you see Catherine truly disturbed and upset, as she walks ahead of them, taking in every word. This strikes me as the turning point, the moment when she finally decides to make her play as a “man”, and to trap her men as they have trapped her. As if to signal her intent, she calmly jumps into the Seine, jolting both men out of their complacent dialogue. . The narration reveals that the men did not understand this moment, and Jim even thought it to be endearing. Neither of them made any link from their conversation to her act, and I think this is a clear demonstration that they are objectifying Catherine, however unintentionally.

Both Jules and Jim expect Catherine to live by their ideas of who she is, and part of her problem is that they see her as the ideal woman. This idea is first introduced even before Catherine is introduced to the audience: both men find a statue of a woman with a calm smile that they both fall in love with. In the next scene, they meet Catherine and liken her to the smiling bust. Her face is presented using similar cinematographic and editing techniques: the camera lingers over her, and she is presented from, multiple angles, extending the moment. Throughout the film, they continue to talk to her less as a human than as a force or even a God. She is called, among other things, the ultimate woman, a Queen. But even though they are placing her on a pedestal, their respect actually reduces her individuality and humanity. An open acknowledgement of her callousness and cruelty would be more equal than the constant allowances they make because of their idealized mental image of her. The scene evokes a history of western art, and the lasting presence of the Venus figure, representative of the ideal woman. It speaks to a millennium of objectification of the female form, and the creating of unreachable standards for women, literally equating the standard with a deity.

Truffaut presents Catherine’s marriage to Jules as a mistake from the onset. Jim is well aware of this, and so, perhaps, is Jules. Truffaut is interested in exploring Jules as a literal “slave” to love (in one of the film’s earliest scenes, he is shown searching for a slave costume), and his relationships with women, always seem to snare him in a kind of trap. He keeps a series of photos of the women he is in love with, and periodically asks each one to marry him until one agrees. After marriage, despite lack of commitment he forgives all indiscretions, even her running away for months at a time, because he loves her. His adoration is unconditional even though it is unreciprocated.

It’s the marriage that reveals the true nature of Catherine’s toxicity. Like Ibsen’s Nora, she runs away to “find herself”, though unlike Nora, she also eventually returns home. She seems to resent being trapped by Jules, often engaging in several affairs simultaneously; despite this she is very controlling permitting no infidelity but her own. Both Jules, and her other lover, Albert, seem satisfied with this arrangement, though neither is happy with it. Even when Catherine courts Jim as yet another lover, both countenance the affair, as a means of ensuring that she does leave them on another one of her adventures… at least not right away, anyway.

Catherine and Jim are essentially very similar. Jim has a lover back in Paris, Gilberte, who loves him in very much the same way Jules loves Catherine. She doesn’t care about his indiscretions as long as she can spend time with him, and cherishes the slight hope that he will one day settle down to be with her. She is faithful to Jim (as far as the audience knows) and is present in his life from the beginning to end of the narrative. This does not necessarily mean that Jim insists upon loyalty from his lovers, as Catherine does, but the implication is that they both approach relationships with the same expectations. However, when both of them fail to abandon their other affair in favour of each other, Jim reacts with mild annoyance, while Catherine is livid.

Her disapproval is not overt, but her actions reveal a sinister and manipulative side of her character. When Jim returns to Paris, the letters she sends him are puzzling. He suspects that she is lying to him about being pregnant, among other things, while she is genuinely upset by the fact that he remains longer than he said he would, a by the fact that he remains longer than he said he would, refusing to credit the idea that he is sick, even though the audience knows that he is. She also clearly resents the presence of Gilberte and wonders why she alone is not enough to satisfy Jim’s desires. It’s here that Catherine takes her controlling nature one step further than reason. Jim is the only man over whom she does not have complete power, and when it becomes clear that he won’t leave Gilberte, she begins a drastic campaign of revenge.

There is something tragic in her actions; one wonders if she always did love Jim above the others, but found him permanently out of reach. The film affords the pair it’s most intimate moments, and it is only with Jim that a softer and more human side to Catherine is revealed. Perhaps she wants what she cannot have: be it Jim, or the ability to live the life of a man. I think the beauty in Moreau’s performance, is that something contradictory is always boiling below the , counteracting what Catherine says or does. Moreau is able to bring to life someone who is truly human, a person who does not have clear motifs and who really does bury their emotions deep inside.

The last time we see Catherine, she’s driving off a bridge with Jim in tow. She is calm, and apparently so is he. The reason for her murder/suicide is not entirely clear, though one can’t help thinking of the earlier scene of her jumping into the water after the play. Is this her final act of control over the men in her life? Did her inability to have Jim all for herself, motivate her to make sure nobody else could have him? If her logic is “if I can’t have him, then no one can”, ”, why kill herself too?. It doesn’t seem quite as simple as her wanting to be joined to a man in death, whom she failed to pin down in life. Again, it’s the uncertainty and the impulsiveness of the action that makes the ending so interesting. Perhaps there is no clear answer.

With her lover, Albert, Catherine writes a song called “Le Tourbillon”. It’s about a man who falls in love with a woman who is impossible in both senses of the word: she seems too good to be true, but she is also impossible to live with. They meet several times over the course of their life, and fall in love each time, only to separate once their night together is through. The song ends on a final meeting, where they ask each other, why they should separate again since they always come back together. Despite the fact that they leave each other once again, they cannot destroy the bond they have. The final verse is like Catherine’s final plunge off the bridge: the characters are separated and yet simultaneously forever bound. Death both separates and unites them.

Edited by: Kiera Chapman

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1. While editing, Kiera rightfully pointed out that the play could indeed be Miss Julie by August Strindberg (Strindberg, unlike Ibsen is a Swede for one). Though they don’t necessarily have the same plot or characters, they both share similar thematic ideas, exploring crippling social mores, and the character’s attempts to escape them.