Jules and Jim

1962, France, François Truffaut, 107 min, French with English subtitles With Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, and Henri Serre

Introduced by author Valeria Luiselli

A doomed love triangle: Best friends fall for the same woman, and their friendship is tested when she marries one of them. After that marriage fails, she attempts to live happily with the other one, with disastrous results. “Almost every scene is shot through with such casual stylistic brilliance. Yet what audiences have always loved about this movie isn’t simply its technical brio but its emotional warmth, its embrace of a world in which tragedy is forever playing hopscotch with farce. Jules and Jim is a movie that enters viewers’ lives like a lover—a masterpiece you can really get a crush on.”—John Powers for The Criterion Collection, February 2014

About the Speaker Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico and grew up in South Africa. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Faces in the Crowd and the book of essays Sidewalks, both translated to multiple languages and published in the USA by Coffee House Press. Her most recent novel is The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, and McSweeney’s, among other places. In 2014 she was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award. She lives in New York City.