People might want to butcher me and cut off my head for daring to give a bad critique on this particular movie. I’m fine with that and I’m ready to live with the shame (if there’s any shame to say what you truly think about a film). My intention is non-provocative. However, if you feel provoked, that is your own problem. Personally, even though this movie has been very positively reviewed from its coming out in 1962 until today, I couldn’t stand it. I know, “Jules et Jim” is a classic, considered one of the finest movies ever made (and so on). Nonetheless, I consider it a terrible movie, one of the worst, if the not THE worst I’ve ever seen. Pretty much everything looked wrong to me. The acting was barely decent. What brought most actions or decisions of the characters was rather confusing. They were never really justified.

The personality of the two main characters, Jules and Jim, was too submissive and absent. Catherine’s personality wasn’t any better, even though it was different as she was the dominant one. She was rather confusing (more than mysterious), she appeared to be emotionally and psychologically unstable. I didn’t see the beauty of a volatile female in her as most have described. Some might say Catherine was an overpowering female, but with such weak men like Jules and Jim, not much power was really needed… Heck, you have the character of Albert (another weak and submissive male) sitting in the same room as all three main characters and he openly shows himself as Catherine’s lover. To the point where they’d be eating all together in a little restaurant, laughing and smiling and what happens after? The “femme volage” shows no shame or secrecy in ending her night with Albert, therefore ditching Jules and Jim, who again go along with it like nice little puppies. And no one sees a problem with that exactly why? At least she was kind enough to leave them the car…

At least cuckolds are not that bad. They are submissive but show at least the minimum emotions of jealousy, anger and enjoyment. Indeed, they enjoy the pain afflicted (either by themselves and/or their partners) on them by seeing and imagining their partners cheating on them. That usually ends also to be a sexual excitement and pleasure… I don’t know if it’s simply bad acting or just bad characters such as Jules and Jim to be portrayed as weak men with total lack of will. Angry or sad they each said they were, really?

It seemed to me too that the ending with Catherine killing herself with Jim was just a quick, easy and cheesy way to put an end to his no-ending-back-and-forth-voyage-between-France-and-Austria. Wait; did the word “end” come up too much? It seemed to me that the movie was never going to finish (thinking it’s a three hours movie, I don’t wonder much anymore). The story wasn’t going anywhere, just confused characters moving in circle on themselves. Oh well, Jules didn’t seem to be that saddened by the event of his cheating wife and best friend’s deaths.

Many scenes seemed to want to portrait warmth between the characters, but that warmth was barely tangible. On top of that, the sudden appearances of the narrator’s very loud and neutral voice destroyed the mood that was ABOUT to be set between the characters, every single time. Very often the scenes looked like they were cut right in middle, at inappropriate timing. The story didn’t flow smoothly from those cuts. “Wait! Where are you going?!” I had to ask too many times.

I couldn’t help myself but to shiver, grunt and groan throughout the whole movie…