Jules et Jim
Mar. 13th, 2016 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartOur Picturehouse is having a mini-season of Hitchcock and Truffaut in its "Vintage Sundays" slot, and this week they were showing Jules et Jim, which is one of my favourite of Truffaut's films (I have seen most of them, because he was one of the "special topics" on the A-Level French syllabus I did, a special topic basically being something we were supposed to study and be able to write exam essays on in French at the same level as we would have done in English), though I don't think I'd seen it since 1992 and had certainly never seen it on a bigger screen than the large TVs the sixth form college had for showing videos. (Which is a shame, as there were cinematographic feature like the repeated freeze-frame on close-ups at significant moments that I don't think were discernible at all on video.)
It's still a great film, and is, rather predictably, full of stuff that 17-year-old me simply didn't get*. Even then I was shipping Jules/Jim like anything and would definitely have identified Catherine as a Dark Manic Pixie Dream Girl if I'd had the vocabulary, but the definitely-implied polyamory went right over my head**, as did the genderqueer implications of the scene where Catherine dresses as a man, and the way the whole film questions traditional ideas of relationships and gender roles. My heart still breaks for Jules, but this time round I also had more sympathy for Catherine who clearly feels utterly constricted by the feminine role she is confined in, as well as finding her MPDG-ness infinitely more annoying now I have got past the stage of aspiring to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl myself (something for which this film may be at least partly to blame, as I now realise that it had quite a formative effect on me***). I feel less sympathy for Jim, who just mostly seems to passively accept that everyone wants to shag him and can't make up his mind between Catherine and Gilberte (let alone accepting that he and Jules are the real OTP here).
And I know it's a 50-year-old French arthouse film, but how is there no fic at all for it?
*I was not so much "innocent" as "totally clueless".
**I had vaguely remembered it as "tragic love triangle which could have been so much happier if everyone had understood about polyamory", but actually they try that but it falls apart, mostly because of Catherine being unable to resist drama.
***One manifestation of which is that I suddenly understood why I'm fascinated with the central relationship in Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love sequence, despite not actually liking the books that much; the dynamics aren't all that different from Jules, Jim and Catherine.
It's still a great film, and is, rather predictably, full of stuff that 17-year-old me simply didn't get*. Even then I was shipping Jules/Jim like anything and would definitely have identified Catherine as a Dark Manic Pixie Dream Girl if I'd had the vocabulary, but the definitely-implied polyamory went right over my head**, as did the genderqueer implications of the scene where Catherine dresses as a man, and the way the whole film questions traditional ideas of relationships and gender roles. My heart still breaks for Jules, but this time round I also had more sympathy for Catherine who clearly feels utterly constricted by the feminine role she is confined in, as well as finding her MPDG-ness infinitely more annoying now I have got past the stage of aspiring to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl myself (something for which this film may be at least partly to blame, as I now realise that it had quite a formative effect on me***). I feel less sympathy for Jim, who just mostly seems to passively accept that everyone wants to shag him and can't make up his mind between Catherine and Gilberte (let alone accepting that he and Jules are the real OTP here).
And I know it's a 50-year-old French arthouse film, but how is there no fic at all for it?
*I was not so much "innocent" as "totally clueless".
**I had vaguely remembered it as "tragic love triangle which could have been so much happier if everyone had understood about polyamory", but actually they try that but it falls apart, mostly because of Catherine being unable to resist drama.
***One manifestation of which is that I suddenly understood why I'm fascinated with the central relationship in Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love sequence, despite not actually liking the books that much; the dynamics aren't all that different from Jules, Jim and Catherine.
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