In Love with a Smile

Jules and Jim (Janus) are friends. Jules is short and round and Austrian. Jim is tall and skinny and French. They live in Paris of 1912, and are almost as young as they feel. All day they write poetry, all night they run after girls. For relaxation they sneer at money and doodle on cafe tables. Sometimes they box, and once they share a widow.

Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) are the whilom heroes of a gay, grotesque little novel by the late Henri Pierre Roche, now made into a gay, grotesque little movie by France's Franc,ois Truffaut (The 400 Blows). Charming, sick, hilarious, depressing, wise: the film is an exercise in contradiction, a clutter of inconsequence transformed by imagination as a trash heap is transformed by moonlight.

One day Jules and Jim see a sculpture, the head of a woman smiling. Sometimes her smile is the omniscient smile of Sophia, sometimes it is the saurian grin of a Lorelei. They fall in love with the smile.

Then one day they meet a girl (Jeanne Moreau) with the same smile. Her name is Kathe. They fall in love with the girl.

She is crazy, she is fascinating. Just for kicks she dresses up like a bum, smears on a charcoal mustache, goes tramping along the Boul' Mich in broad daylight. She keeps her love letters in a chamber pot.

And one night in full evening dress she casually jumps into the Seine.

Jules proposes. Kathe accepts. Abruptly the adolescent idyl becomes a domestic comitragedy. Jules is the eternal youth, passive and innocent. Kathe is the eternal feminine, passionate and cunning.

Neither is willing to become human, to grow up. Jules sees that he cannot hold her. "Love her," he pleads with Jim.

"Marry her. And let me see her." The affair between Kathe and Jim begins gaily. But she is too capricious, he is too suspicious. She kicks him out. He does not come back. She is indignant. One day, demurely, she invites him for a ride in the country, smiles at him sweetly, drives off a bridge. Jules makes the funeral arrangements for the car-crossed lovers--with relief.

Jules and Jim trails off a bit toward the end, but over three-fourths of the distance it is one of the most exciting and likable films so far produced by the new French school of cinema (TIME, Nov. 16, 1959). The performances are superb. The leading men range with ease from piffle to pathos, and Actress Moreau, who has too long been typed as a gamine Garbo, reveals a pretty capacity to clown.

Moreover, the sunny-moony musical score by Georges Delerue is enchanting.

The technical effects are formidable.

Truffaut employs a hundred subtle tricks of the editor's trade -- rapid shifts of image, sudden changes in screen size -- to surprise the eye. But in Truffaut's work technique matters less than feeling. His feeling is spontaneous, sincere, generous, naive, natural. It bubbles up like the spring of life itself. A spectator who sits down to this picture feeling old and dry will rise up feeling young and green.

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