Jules et Jim

Paris, 1912: Two best friends, the French writer Jim and the Austrian Jules, fall in love with Catherine. Their carefree ménage-à-trois comes to an abrupt end with the outbreak of war, and when they meet again in the Black Forest a few years later, Catherine and Jules are a family, yet the feelings between her and Jim still burn fiercely… No matter how light-footedly the camera whirls through this bittersweet love story—a highlight of the Nouvelle Vague—the film also, and above all, tells of the stagnation and disappearance of a free-spirited society at the beginning of the 20th century. On its leading actor: “Werner didn’t understand a quarter of his lines, because he could barely speak French. Yet what he brought to the film proves him to be a great Burgtheater actor.”
(Florian Widegger)