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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 governed by 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 despondently: 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 brave 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 by critics thinking 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 as they don’t object or reject that 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 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, a lesbian who was not a movie lover, was unusually bewitched by her.) The great misanthrope Moreau increases the crank of psycho bitch games with such elementary overtness that liberal viewers are made stupor. (Had the two men dumped her, she’d become Genet’s Mademoiselle.) Truffaut blunting the suggestiveness in a three-way, the movie ends up a bummer morality play by default; where else could he go if he fears the consequences of his dream? An empty sacrifice, as the old Legion of Decency gave the film its dreaded “C” rating anyway. In evocation of Paris in the early 1900s, Jules et Jim is close to ravishing to look at—Raoul Coutard’s imagery induces wishful time travel. Discernibly dumb as Jules et Jim may be to a hipper audience, dumber is Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. While more tolerable than the posers-in-shadows chatting anxiously in screamingly gauche bedrooms in Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a cryptic mess filmed at Munich’s Nymphenburg and Schleissheim palaces as joint hotel that may be about guests apparently trying to forget the bad sex they had there a year earlier, L’Avventura isn’t as discombobulating, but it isn’t 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 beyond emblems from the Euro fart art era? If the directors were compelled to re-examine their highfalutin essaying—all the heavy treading of sterility, alienation, boredom and self-absorption—they’d be embarrassed by the ease with which we see how they’ve camouflaged shallowness, mistreated situational emotions and amplified meaningless sexual dalliances. 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, though her character’s density is: letting Gabriele Ferzetti sniff her heated scent after the sudden yet not that perturbing of a disappearance of his girlfriend and her close friend, she nervously avoids his seductive powers on a yacht and then on a train until, being reminded to keep looking for who’s missing, they drive to a mountain village where, before resuming the search, they’ll heavily neck on a hill leading to messy hair and exhaustion. Later coming upon him putting the make on a bimbo on a hotel couch, she feigns giving a damn that he’s a serial womanizer. The teasing promise of comedy stays persistently out of reach. 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 despondently(Revised 9/2025) All Rights Reserved.
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