Jules Et Jim

Very popular 1962 movie from the most likeable man in the business, Francois Truffaut.
This film's first hour or so is completely delightful. Truffaut adopts a camera of constant movement, choosing to pan sleekly and frequently around, combined with short scenes this conveys a real sense of excitment. The geuine kindness we see between the protagonists is at once rare and refresehing, the lightly worn period setting adding an elegance and interest without, to be sure, giving a dated plot.
The first world war is evoked wonderfully, the length of the library footage is a smart move; too short would be cursory, so we are made to dwell again and again at the diverified images of the war.
The whole film is, really, a wonderful character study. The character of Jules is most easy to directly identify with, we all know a Catherine, and Jim has a resolve to him that put us in mind of a character from Tolstoy. This kind of name-dropping is an indication of how Truffaut is both an intelligent enough person and a talented enough filmmaker to understand inner pyschologies on screen. He adopts the technqiue of presenting a sweet veneer, then shocking (mildly) the audience with an admission by one of the (admirably well played) actors.
For the last half hour there are perhaps too many twists and turns, sullying the purity a little, perhaps showing the script's debt to its novelistic genesis. Perhaps on second viewing this would come as less of a surprise.
Truffaut puts images together in largely mid shots, the music swells at times and is a point of interest in its own rights.
A film that starts off delightfully and, if it perhaps gets a little too complicated, retains a wonderfully new tone and characterisation to its end.