576
PAULINE KAEL
becomes the
civilizing
influence in their lives. The war blasts the
images of Bohemian life; both Jules and Jim are changed, but not
Catherine. She is the unreconstructed Bohemian who does
not
settle
down. She needed more strength, more will than they to live the
artist's life-and this determination is the uncivilizing factor. Bohemian–
ism has made her, underneath all the graces, a moral barbarian: freedom
has come to mean whatever she says it is. And when she loses what she
believes to be freedom-when she can no longer dictate the terms on
which Jim will live-she is lost, destroyed. She no longer makes art
out of life; she makes life hell.
She chooses death, and she calls on Jules to observe her choice, the
last demonstration of her power over life and death, because Jules by
a lifetime of yielding his own freedom to her has become, to her,
a witness. He can only observe grand gestures; he cannot
make
them.
In the last moment in the car, when self-destruction is completely
determined, she smiles the smile of the statue: this was the mystery
that drew them to her-the smile that looks so easy and natural but
which is self-contained and impenetrable.
Jules and Jim
ends after the burning of the books in Germany,
the end of an epoch, as Truffaut has said, for intellectual Bohemians like
Jules and Jim. The film is, in a way, a tribute to the books that were
burned; I can't think of another movie so full of books, and of references
to books and of writing and translating books. Books were the blood of
these characters: they took their ideas of life from books, and writing
books was their idea of living.
Jules and Jim
is, among other things, the best movie ever made
about what I guess most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period.
Catherine jumping into the waters of the Seine to demonstrate her
supremacy over Jules and Jim who are discussing the weaknesses of
women, is not unlike Zelda jumping over that balustrade. This filmic
treatment of the period is a work of lyric poetry, a work of art as
complex and suggestive in its way as the paintings and poetry and
novels and music of the period that it is based on. It is a tribute to the
school of Paris when art and Paris were synonymous; filmically it is a
new school of Paris-and the new school of Paris is cinema. You go to
movies, you talk movies, and you make movies. The young French
painters don't compare with the Americans, and French literature is in
a fancy trance, but oh, how the young French artists can make movies!
Several of the critics, among them Kauffmann, have complained
that the song Jeanne Moreau sings is irrelevant to the action of the film.
It's embarrassing to have to point out the obvious, that the song is the
