Jules and Jim (1962)
Directed by François Truffaut
In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.
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What critics compared Jules and Jim to
In other words, the threesome's delight in replaying scenes from Band of Outsiders and Jules and Jim is shared by the director, for whom the art of making love to the French New Wave is nothing new.
Given the plot, it's odd that Truffaut's Jules and Jim is never alluded to in any way, and the references to other movies that are included usually work better for the Cincinnati crowd (with its narrower choices) than for Parisians or Chicagoans (except for the one most American viewers are likely to find inexplicable -- clips from the end of Robert Bresson's Mouchette to contextualize a suicide attempt, which I found offensive).
For a while the trio sustains a friendship that has pleasing echoes of the romantic triangle in François Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” but Jongsu is seized by inevitable jealousy.
But the Harold & Maude poster above the two naked high-schoolers energetically screwing in the opening shot, not to mention the arch voiceover narrator that intrudes at key moments à la Truffaut�s Jules and Jim, suggests that director Alfonso Cuarón had more in mind than parodying crass Hollywood teensploitation.
Other sources include Allen's "Manhattan" ("Frances Ha," too, is presented in black-and-white) and the romantic classics of the French New Wave (the movie borrows much of its music from Georges Delerue, known for his work on such films as "Jules and Jim" and "Hiroshima Mon Amour," and from Jean Constantin, who scored "The 400 Blows").
Yet most of the energizing formal ideas are taken from other movies; the creative nadir may be when Baumbach uses Georges Delerue's iconic theme from Jules and Jim as a shortcut to pathos.
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Pungent, nasty and teeming with colorful crooked types, the writer-director’s most vibrant (and violent) work in some time is a bracingly sordid saga of two young pot growers, the Orange County princess they love and the vicious Mexican cartel they get entangled with; imagine “Jules and Jim” with bombs and beheadings and you’re halfway there.
In fact, before Benicio Del Toro (as the villainous cartel enforcer) and John Travolta (as a double-dealing Drug Enforcement agent) make their hambone entrances, I thought Stone was redoing Truffaut's Jules and Jim: two guys and a girl, love pulling them every which way.
Sort of “Jules and Jim” — and joints.
If all this sounds like a remake of “Jules and Jim” seen through a haze of a THC cloud, you’d be right.
I suppose you could call it Stone’s version of “Jules and Jim,” plus beheadings, torchings, bombings and strafings.
"His gaze made her feel pretty," intones the narrator, in a voice of bruised longing reminiscent of French New Wave films like "Jules and Jim."
Also, many reviewers who have carped about the narration of Christopher Evan Welch in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, do not realize that Allen is using the late Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) as a major source.
Crowe, ever the hipster, even calls upon the archetypes that postmodern American pop has repressed into its subconscious: Really, don't all current dream girls worth their salt owe a debt to Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's Jules and Jim?
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Though he pays homage to Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” Jeunet (who co-wrote the screenplay with Giulliame Laurant) is clearly more influenced by the slam-bang visual pyrotechnics of Hollywood directors like Steven Spielberg than such stately French masters as Eric Rohmer.
The movie sneaks in a clip from Jules and Jim, but it’s much closer kin to the unmoored antics of Shoot the Piano Player.
In fact, Tashi has nothing on Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the woman whose affections Jules and Jim vie for until Jules ends up marrying and having a child with her.