Word: truffauts
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Jutes and Jim. Director François Truffaut's story of three young people in Paris is so spontaneous, sincere, generous, naive and natural that a spectator who sits down to watch it feeling old and dry may rise up feeling young and green...
Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) are the whilom heroes of a gay, grotesque little novel by the late Henri Pierre Roché, now made into a gay, grotesque little movie by France's François Truffaut (The 400 Blows). Charming, sick, hilarious, depressing, wise: the film is an exercise in contradiction, a clutter of inconsequence transformed by imagination as a trash heap is transformed by moonlight...
...Truffaut employs a hundred subtle tricks of the editor's trade - rapid shifts of image, sudden changes in screen size - to surprise the eye. But in Truffaut's work technique matters less than feeling. His feeling is spontaneous, sincere, generous, naive, natural. It bubbles up like the spring of life itself. A spectator who sits down to this picture feeling old and dry will rise up feeling young and green...
...plight of Antoine Doinel could easily lend itself to appalling pathos, but Truffaut (who also wrote the screenplay) has scrupulously avoided this danger. Child-like comic effects predominate in many scenes, particularly those without adults; and realizing that in spite of his trials Dolnel can still behave like a happy and naive little boy, the viewer is made acutely aware of the wide gulf between the child and the adult. The film thus evokes a sense of frustration rather than pity...
...Blows" is a fine example of pictorial art. Its faults are too minor to be included here, and the elements of social criticism are, to me, equally unimportant. The motion picture has its own peculiar acsthetic attributes and, by exploring them, Truffaut has directed a tender and appealing film...