Jules Et Jim

Free love, with "free" the word.

Nine times out of ten in a movie, lovers explain what he saw in her, what she saw in him, and when and where he and she saw it. Not in Francois Truffaut's third - and still most popular - film, though.

Wait for Jules et Jim to tell you why its three characters fall in and out of love, and you'll still be waiting when they turn you out of the cinema. Jules and Jim are men about Montparnasse in 1912. Jim is tall, shrewd and French-polished, Jules is a little Austrian sleepyhead. Both are inseparable bachelors - they ride, box, drink, flirt, scribble verse, share their girls. Charming, gay and idle J. and J.

One day, enter Catherine, a gallivanting gamine, a tomboy on a tight rope, an airy-fairy. She invents life the way other people invent lies. She pulls on men's clothes and races J. and J. on their bikes across the bridges of Paris, keeps love letters in her chamber pot and an acid flask in her purse for cads who take life seriously.

But just when J. and J. think they have got her number, she gives them the slip, even if she has to jump into the Seine to do it. With the dexterity of a card sharper, Truffaut riffs through the trio's love life, palming hearts, playing unexpected aces, putting on a dazzling display of sex attractions and emotional affinities. A scene opens.

Catherine loves Jim. The scene closes. A new scene opens. Now Catherine loves Jules. Any number can play. A friend says, "Come to tea." All three accept.

Catherine makes a sweet little parcel of her pyjamas and brings them along, too. In the end, it's the men that weaken.

Moral (perhaps): free love can be beautiful, but it helps to follow a few of the older-established French rules. Based, vaguely, on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Truffaut has treated this story in a dazzlingly Nouvelle Vague manner, deconstructing it even as he spins it, jockeying us along with light touches of the whip of romance.

When shown in London in 1962, it ran for almost a year - it seemed light years ahead of anything else that was showing on the screen at the time. Dozens of imitations have since appeared, but none has the shock of the technical virtuosity with which Truffaut keeps his three lovers dancing on a jet of pure emotion. Henri Serre (Jim), Jeanne Moreau (Catherine) and Oskar Werner (Jules) are impeccable.

"They will write 'Amant de Jules et Jim' on my gravestone when I go," Moreau once joked to me about the role that, more than almost any other, defined her iconic image in French cinema.

If you catch the film on Mon 9 Apr, you'll have a rare encounter with Truffaut's first wife, Madeleine Morgenstern, who'll be in conversation with Don Allen, author of Finally, Truffaut.

Jules Et Jim
Cert: PG