Wine&Glory

Good mornin upper east siders! Gossip Girl here. Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite. And who am I? That’s one secret I’ll never tell. You know you love me.
Xoxo, Gossip Girl.

Thanks to Istanbul Fashion Week so that I’ve learned a lot of Turkish fashion designers that I don’t even heard. Although I’m in Ankara these days and had invitation to IFW, I didn’t go and watch catwalk, did something much better ;) But I checked the albums out! Anyone who’s planning to go to Fashion’s Night Out on 16th September? Last year, honestly, it was quite bad. Hoping that it will be better this time. Also, the IFW and the New York Fashion Week comes at the same times in this year. So.. A lot of major cities in the continent, and its smells like fashion. What a beautiful thing! I guess I’m not attending, because I have to go to another city. I spent a very nice times in this weekend, with my darling. But my closest friends of three perhaps five, attending to invitations. I listen to them. And I’m going to ask them; IFW, how was in this year? I’ll keep on following. Happy fashion weeks y’all :)

Decades of a love triangle concerning two friends and an impulsive woman.

A perceptive exploration of desire..

You said, “I love you,” I said, “Wait.”

I was going to say, “Take me,” you said, “Go away.” 

Catherine

                                     France, 1962

Jules and Jim, is a 1962 French film directed by François Truffaut based on Henri-Pierre Roché’s semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund. The soundtrack by Georges Delerue was named as one of the “10 best soundtracks” by Time magazine in its “All Time 100 Movies” list.

Jules and Jim are best friends – perhaps soulmates – who together pursue a charmed life of bohemian indulgence in turn-of-the-century Paris. Drifting from liaison to liaison they share their women as easily as wine, without jealousy or regret – and then they meet Kate. With her “archaic” smile and lips made for “milk – and blood”, Kate is obedient only to the diktat: “He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.” Marrying first Jules and then Jim, Kate draws all three into an ecstatic cycle of intimacy and betrayal, unleashing a seemingly limitless capacity for tenderness, forgiveness and revenge until their passions eventually burn out. 

-Jeanne Moreau in François Truffaut’s 1962 film version of Jules et Jim. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

Roché’s guileless prose lends the quality of a parable to his story, which is startling in its erotic candour and its visionary pursuit of love. Kate owes much – perhaps too much – to the figure of the eternal feminine: cruel, beautiful and volatile, she is more archetype than actuality. But that is not really Roché’s concern – instead he probes the “essential quality of our intimate emotions”, laying bare the complex and paradoxical dynamics of desire.

Today the novel is eclipsed by François Truffaut’s celebrated nouvelle vague film starring Jeanne Moreau, and Truffaut contributes a valuable afterword to this edition. Reflecting on the film in 2000, Moreau described it as “the dreamed image of amorous life”; in its exuberant rejection of conventional morality, Roché’s novel describes an emotional logic that is both inscrutable and compelling.

He did this with the aid of copious references to old movies, photographs, paintings, novels, music and theatre. Few other films illustrate better the axiom that the best film-makers have to know something about all the arts. But it is the changing reactions of the menage à trois to each other that most of us remember.

-Photo: Raymond Cauchetier: Oskar Werner & Henri Serre, on the set of Jules et Jim, 1962

Although the film is called Jules et Jim, the dominant character in it is Catherine. She is independent, unpredictable and silly enough to throw herself into the Seine when the two men discuss a Strindberg play without her participation. She is prepared to bear Jules a child but not ready to be either an orthodox wife or mother. She even starts an affair with Jim, half knowing that both men are too fond of each other and of her to break off their friendship. Besides, as she says, “one is never completely in love for more than a moment.”

-A frame from the film

 Jeanne Moreau, was the perfect choice for Catherine: she gives a performance full of gaiety and charm without conveying an empty-headed bimbo. She makes the watcher understand that this is no ordinary woman whom both men adore. It is possibly the most complete portrait of any feminine character in the entire ouevre of the New Wave and it made her an international star. 

The film is full of idyllic moments that translate into doubt and retreat. The atmosphere of gathering gloom with which the film ends is thus totally logical, matching the storm clouds over Europe. “They left nothing behind them,” is the commentary’s epitaph after the death of Catherine. The whirlwind of life continues but without the three friends.

Jules: She’s more optimistic than you where time’s concerned. She was at the hairdresser’s and and arrived at 8:00 to dine with you. 

Jim: If I’d known she might still come, I’d have waited til midnight. 

Truffaut began reworking the Jules and Jim script he had shown to Roché three years before, adding material from the diaries Roché kept for nearly 60 years, about the love triangle between himself and Helen and Franz Hessel. Truffaut wanted the film to be “a hymn to life and death, a demonstration through joy and sadness of the impossibility of any love combination, apart from the couple.”