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DUMB AND DUMBER François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim offers up a question I still don’t have an answer for: Can a period piece immersed in early 60s French moderism stand the test of a contemporary audience? Something’s not right throughout what has been acclaimed as a “celebration of bohemian life” ending so tragically: isn’t a happy ménage à trois the implicit dream play of Truffaut? As the story starts to unfold, there’s a subdued erotic arousal in what looks to be a trilateral possession. Therein lies the nasty rub—the woman Catherine who enters the cozy world of Jules and Jim is much less than what they were originally charmed by and definitely not equal to them. I’m perplexed critics think Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine is independent, intellectual, a free thinker. She’s the diametric opposite; for brevity’s sake, she’s childishly arbitrary and a control freak. She’s playing out the parts Jules and Jim fantasize (or tolerate) about her, and it becomes fatal they don’t object and then reject she’s made of them simultaneously willing and unwilling wimps. How can she really be the one Jules and Jim want to share, especially after she slaps Jules and then capriciously jumps fully clothed into a river? These two men are highly literate and often very perceptive—they would have read or seen Strindberg and Ibsen and come to recognize the warnings of poison. Stanley Kauffmann is right, despite what his Pacifica Radio nemesis says: Catherine is more than a little nuts, she’s psychotic. (My late mother, who was not a movie lover but probably a repressed man-hater, was held captive by her.) Moreau skirts danger: as Catherine the fundamental bore she leans toward boring; the psycho bitch games are so overt Jules and Jim become dolts and some of us made stupor. (Had the men dumped her, she’d have become Genet’s Mademoiselle.) Because Truffaut blunts any suggestion of a three-way, the movie appears to have to become a lyrical but nevertheless bummer morality play by default; where else could he go if he feared the consequences? As it happened, the old Legion of Decency gave the film its dreaded “C” rating anyway. In evocation of the period, Jules et Jim is close to ravishing—Raoul Coutard’s imagery induces a melancholic time travel feel. Discernibly dumb as Jules et Jim may be to a hipper audience, dumber is Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. More tolerable than the posing-in-banquet halls and chatting-in-overstuffed-lobbies characterizing Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, it’s not as entertaining as Fellini’s conspicuous La Dolce Vita. Who’d argue these pictures, and Antonioni’s La Notte and Fellini’s 8½, aren’t really anything more than emblems from the fart art era? If the directors were compelled to re-examine their highfalutin essaying—all the heavy treading of Euro sterility, alienation, boredom and self-absorption—they’d be (and should be) embarrassed by the ease with which we see how they’ve camouflaged what are commonplace emotions and sexual tensions. Marty Scorsesse gives Antonioni a dubious out, lauding the director for having made a “movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving.” Ingmar Bergman, however, would say, “I don’t feel anything for L’Avventura, only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.” A high fashion Cate Blanchett glossy years before she arrived, Vitti isn’t entirely intolerable here, but her character’s density is: letting Gabriele Ferzetti sniff her heated scent after the sudden yet apparently not very disturbing disappearance of his girlfriend, and her close friend, she nervously avoids his seductive powers on a yacht and then a train until they drive to a mountainous village, after remembering to keep looking for the missing woman, where they’ll heavily neck on a hill leading to messy hair and exhaustion. Later coming upon him putting the make on a young bimbo on a hotel couch, she feigns giving a damn that he’s a serial womanizer. Thiefs of grief, Vitti the icon of mussed hair and Ferzetti the intercontinental schmoozer are Euros trashing their way through discarded angst. Aldo Scavarda’s photography keeps a lot of cineastes from seeing the zero-sum game of Antonioni and his ciphers. Maybe enthusiasts need Smell-o-Vision to detect the flatulence. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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