On the occasion of the International Day of Friendship, rediscover the classic film of the French New Wave, "Jules and Jim" by François Truffaut.
In pre-war Paris, the Paris of the Roaring Twenties and the cabarets, two young men united by the same tastes meet. Jules is an intellectual Austrian in love with women who do not love him. Jim is a French seducer, collecting adventures. They share the taste of long discussions, the effervescence of Paris. To the uninitiated, they even seem to be lovers. Their friendship surprises by the differences between the two men which become so many features of unions between them. They hardly agree, they argue a lot but never agree. Perhaps this is the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure of discovering each other through the other. The relationship with women, a symbol of their difference but also a crucial element in the rest of the story, is their only major difference. From this will be born a complacency of one towards the other. Each of them loves women in his own way, but they have in common this tacit agreement, this pact of non-aggression which will testify to their eternal mutual respect.
Their meeting will be marked by the meeting of Catherine, an incandescent and excessive woman who will turn the heads of both men. Jules begs Jim not to go near it, aware of his inferiority compared to his friend. Jim obeys him, despite his regrets. He will pursue all his life this supreme woman, an unsurpassable figure that he will never manage to forget. The duo becomes a strange trio, where Catherine desires one and then the other, resolves herself to one but considers the other. Finally, Jules becomes her husband while Jim disappears in the torments of the Second World War. Of this war, nothing will be said in the film except the mutual fear of the two friends to kill each other, separated from now on by the national stakes.
When Jim returns from the war, he finds the infernal duo that had occupied his youth. The couple has lost its shine: Jules no longer holds back his wife's desire but cannot bring himself to stop loving her, while Catherine, who has lost none of her charm, escapes boredom with adulteries that have no consequences and no scope. Jules resolves to implore his friend. If he cannot keep his wife's love, he prefers to keep her as his friend and entrust her to Jim. He then demonstrates both his love for Catherine and his friendship for Jim. He prefers to know that she is happy than with him. He entrusts the love of his life to his best friend. Jim, reluctant at first, finally agrees. The best, most virtuous decision, however, will not be the right one.
Their friendship, faithful to the tragedy so popular in France, can only end with the death of the protagonists. If the couple of Jules and Catherine had been quiet and reasoned, it will be nothing like the new couple formed by Jim and Catherine. He loves her with a love that is too brutal, too fleeting. The love yesterday prevented by the pact between the two friends does not last and he ends up abandoning Catherine, victim of his excesses. Catherine then realizes her mistake: she has abandoned the husband who had never stopped loving her for the forbidden, the impossible love with Jim which will finally not have lasted. Once the mirage passed, there was nothing left. She commits suicide in her car, unable to accept being abandoned.
Of this drama told in Jules and Jim, what finally remains? There is nothing left of the family, disappeared by the wife's desires. There is nothing left of love, ruined by the reversals and erosion of time. All that remains are painfully the memories of a man for the woman he loved. But what remains even more is the indefectible friendship between two men, the blind trust they have granted each other, the loves they have renounced for each other, the absence of rivalry and jealousy despite everything. More than Catherine, it will remain this brotherly love that can unites two people. This quiet and reassuring love that we all pursue here.