François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim from 1962 is the love triangle that feels like it’s happening in the swinging 60s present moment, like Godard’s triple-header Bande à Part. Actually, it’s set before and after the first world war, and the three principals finally reunite by bumping into each other at a Paris cinema showing a newsreel about the Nazis’ book-burning. (It’s based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, who wrote another love-triangle story, Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent, which Truffaut filmed as Two English Girls in 1971.)
Appropriately for this film’s internationalist ethos, neither male hero has a homeland-appropriate name. Oskar Werner is Jules, a diffident young Austrian living in 1912 Paris: scholar, translator and Francophile. He befriends the rather more worldly Frenchman Jim, the journalist and would-be author played by Henri Serre. They are instantly as thick as thieves, a couple of jaunty swells and elegant flâneurs, devoted to art and avowedly uninterested in money – though each, apparently, has some modest private income. They drink in cafes, discuss poetry, box together at the gym and in a rather desultory way pursue women, including the madcap Thérèse (played by Truffaut stalwart Marie Dubois) who has a party trick of puffing a cigarette from the wrong end like a steam train.
