“Truffaut’s finest film” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times), Jules et Jim is set in Paris between the end of the belle époque and the beginning of the Second World War. Sublimely romantic, the film chronicles the making and breaking of a ménage à trois. The friendship between two bohemians – Jules, a shy Austrian entomologist, and Jim, a dashing French novelist – is disrupted when they both fall in love with their ideal woman, Catherine. Capricious, exuberant, narcissistic, thoroughly modern and not a little mad, Catherine is impossible to possess, a fact Jules and Jim cannot accept. (Jeanne Moreau said of Catherine: “She’s not immoral. She’s absolute.”) Truffaut fills the widescreen frame with exuberant photographic and editing effects, composing with a sometimes delirious camera whose circling and swirling captures the vertigo that Jules and Jim experience when they are close to the tragically elusive Catherine. “The film that made me the most fondly jealous of Truffaut. I wish I’d made it” (Jean Renoir). “Elliptical, full of wit and radiance, this is the best movie ever made about what most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period” (Pauline Kael).