Francois Truffaut’s ‘Jules and Jim’ | October 9 at 1:00 p.m. | 801 Magnolia Avenue
In the 1960s Hollywood was dishing up pap like Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, while much tastier fare was simmering abroad, in France and Italy and England and Sweden and Poland and Japan, where innovative artists such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini were looking at life in a more complex, exciting way and putting their vision of it on the screen.
American audiences began to take notice, especially of a French director named Francois Truffaut, whose The 400 Blows, about a resilient young street kid, became an art house hit.
And then Truffaut’s Jules and Jim arrived.
One of the rewarding pleasures of movies is seeing one with friends and then chatting about it when the lights come up. That’s just what the Piedmont Flix Fest, which meets on the second Thursday of each month, offers: a great movie in a comfortable setting, and then a lively discussion of it afterward.
The Flix Fest’s next showing is indeed the 1962 Truffaut film, Jules and Jim. There’s nothing quite like this luminous tragicomedy.
It sets out in the deceptively carefree days before World War I, when a soft-spoken Austrian author Jules (Oskar Werner) strikes up a friendship with an exuberant Frenchman, Jim (Henri Serre).
Both men fall for the same bohemian force of nature, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Seeming to have come out of nowhere, she entrances them with her beauty and wild freedom, and Jim instantly starts writing a novel about the intensity of their three-way romance. Jules wins her hand—but not all her heart. After the war, Jim visits her and Jules and their daughter in their Austrian home and discovers not only that his feelings for Catherine are unchanged, but also that they’re reciprocated.
All this plays out in a fresh, inventive style that entranced critics and audiences alike, though not everyone loved the movie—it was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency when it opened in the U.S.
Jules and Jim will be screened on October 9th at 1:00 p.m.
Sponsored by the Rec Department, the Flix Fest events take place in the Center for the Arts at 801 Magnolia Avenue on the second Thursday of each month. Doors will open at 12:45. The movie is free and available to anyone over 18 years of age. Participants are invited on a drop-in basis, though registration with the PRD is encouraged and can be done at https://bit.ly/3PJyxkP. Everyone is welcome to bring snacks or lunch.
The next movie in the Piedmont series is the James Stewart western, Bend of the River, to be screened on November 13.