The French New Wave classic chronicles the lives of two men and the dangerous object of their affections
![Jules et Jim review – Truffaut’s love triangle is a whirlwind masterpiece](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7604d1b816b455f4dd0459e9ae82a4480f92d328/364_0_1333_800/master/1333.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctcmV2aWV3LTUucG5n&enable=upscale&s=deb73591a623df5ea6ae553b46e5ae5a)
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.