MOVIE CHRONICLE
575
she is the woman with rights and responsibilities who entered Western
literature after the turn of the century and has almost always been
seen by the male authors as demanding the rights but refusing the
responsibilities. This is the traditional male view of the feminist, and
the film's view is not different.
Catherine, in her way, compensates for the homage she demands.
She has, despite her need to intrude and to dominate, the gift for life.
She holds nothing in reserve; she lives out her desires; when she can't
control the situation, she destroys it. Catherine may be wrong-headed–
as those who aspire to be free spirits often are (and they make this
wrongness more visible than pliable, amiable people do) but she is
devoid of hypocrisy and she doesn't lie. In one of the most upsetting
and odd little scenes in the film she takes out a bottle which she says is
"vitriol for lying eyes"-and Jim doesn't react any more than if it were
aspirin. Catherine the free spirit has the insanity of many free spirits–
she believes that she knows truth from lies, right from wrong. Her
absolutism is fascinating, but it is also rather clearly
morally insane.
She
punishes Jim because he has not broken with Gilberte, though she has
not broken with Jules. Only the relationships
she
sets and dominates are
right.
Catherine suffers from the fatal ambivalence of the "free and
equal" woman toward sex: she can leave men, but if they leave her, she
is as abandoned and desolate, as destroyed and helpless as any clinging
vine.
Jules and Jim
is about the impossibility of freedom, as it is about
the many losses of innocence.
All these elements are elliptical in the film-you catch them out of
the corner of your eye and mind. So much is caught in the span of an
hour and three quarters that even if you don't catch more than a
fraction of the possible meanings in the material, you still get far more
than if you examined almost any other current film, frame by frame,
under a microscope.
Jules and Jim
is as full of character and wit and
radiance as
Marienbad
is empty, and the performance by Jeanne Moreau
is so vivid that the bored, alienated wife of
La Notte
is a faded mono–
chrome. In
Jules and Jim
alienation is just one aspect of her character
and we see how Catherine got there: she
becomes
alienated when she
can't get her own way, when she is blocked.
It
is not a universal
condition as in
La Notte
(neither Jules nor Jim shares in it): it is her
developing insanity as she is cut off from what she wants and no longer
takes pleasure in life.
Jules and Jim are portraits of artists as young men, but they are the
kind of artists who grow up into something else-they become specialists
in some field, or journalists; and the dedication to art of their youth
