574
PAULINE KAEL
too independent to be dominated by her whims. Not completely capti–
vated, Jim fails to believe in her love when she most desperately offers
it.
She kills herself and him.
The music, the camera and editing movement, the rhythm of the
film carry us along without pauses for reflection. Truffaut doesn't
linger; nothing is held too long, nothing is over-stated or even
stated.
Perhaps that's why others besides the Legion of Decency have com–
plained: Stanley Kauffmann in
The New R epublic
says that
Jules and
Jim
"loses sight of purposes ...
It
is a confusion of the sheer happiness
of being in the studio ... with the reason for being there." Truffaut
creates movies as other men create novels or poems or paintings; he is
the most youthfully alive and abundant of all the major film directors.
He needs a
reason
for making films about as much as Picasso needs a
reason for picking up a brush or a lump of clay. And of what film–
maker could a reference to a
studio
be less apt? He works everywhere
and with anything at hand. Kauffmann says of
Jules and Jim,
"There is
a lot less here than meets the eye," and Dwight Macdonald, who
considers Kauffmann his only peer, is reassured: "one doesn't want to
be the only square," he writes.
If
it
gives him comfort to know there
are two of them . . .
What is the film about? It's a celebration of life in a great historical
period, a period of ferment and extraordinary achievement in painting
and music and literature. Together Jules and Jim have a peaceful
friendship (and Jim has a quiet love affair with Gilberte) but when
Jules and Jim are with Catherine they feel alive. Anything may happen–
she's the catalyst, the troublemaker, the source of despair as well as
the source of joy. She is the enchantress who makes art out of life.
At the end, Jules, who has always given in to everything in order
to keep Catherine, experiences relief at her death, although he has
always delighted in the splendor she conferred on his existence. The
dullness in Jules, the bourgeois under the Bohemian, the passivity is
made clear from the outset: it is why the girls don't fall in love with
him. At the end, the excitements and humiliations are over. He will
have peace, and after a lifetime with Catherine he has earned it.
Catherine
is,
of course, a little crazy, but that's not too surprising.
Pioneers can easily become fanatics, maniacs. And Catherine is part of
a new breed-the independent, intellectual modern woman, so deter–
mined to live as freely as a man that while claiming equality she uses
every feminine wile to gain extra advantages, to demonstrate her
superiority, and to increase her power-position. She is the emerging
twentieth-century woman satirized by Strindberg, who also adored her;
