Ensemble of Reviews 2

 Captain Phillips (2013)

Tom Hanks is brilliant as the titular character of a Maersk container ship that gets attacked by Somali pirates around the Horn of Africa, but Paul Greengrass’ latest thriller lacks the raw political punch that it could and perhaps should have had. Captain Phillips makes vague attempts to contextualise the plight of Muse (Barkhad Ali) early on, and they do occupy a kind of villainous ambiguity, but the reasoning behind the Somali piracy is never forcefully alluded to or revealed. Perhaps this was deliberately side-stepped by the producers or the money men – after all, it is the financial greed and corporational trading gluttony that facilitated the production of this film.

Thriller movies set on boats and ships have a rich cinematic heritage – Speed 2, Under Siege, The Poseidon Adventure – although this is considerably more serious and considerably less trashy. In truth Captain Phillips loses its lustre as soon as Hanks leaves his ship and gets smuggled away in a lifeboat and taken prisoner by his Somali friends, but then regains it when he has to simulate the visual effects of shock, which Hanks does in absolutely captivating fashioning. Greengrass’ picture is entertaining in its own morosely disaster film-y way, but lacks the ju-ju to really leave an indelible impression on the gods of cinema history (id est me).

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013)

There were serious, debilitating criticisms about the male fantasy lesbian sex scenes featured in Blue is the Warmest Colour last summer when Abdellatif Kechiche’s film clinched the Palme d’Or at Cannes. And they are kind of unnecessary. I’m not being nanny state – these are ten minute scenes, stretched out and exposed to the extent that they lose all cinematic potency, or even interest. Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux had to bare all for their roles and they weren’t particularly pleased about it, calling the shooting experience ‘horrible’ and Kechiche’s directorial style overly demanding, even exploitative. Furthermore the author of the original graphic novel, Julie Maroh, labelled the three hour epic as simply ‘porn’. Nonetheless it cannot be denied that these stories furnished the film with a whole extra layer of PR though.

The film itself seems less a study of homosexuality in modern France – the reactions of Adèle’s friends are only briefly shown – and more a love story about Adèle and Emma, and their evolving and dissolving relationship. In that sense Kechiche’s vision is a pure presentation of love, that love is universal and present regardless of sexual orientation; he looks to liberate his audience’s preconceptions from titillating prejudice. Narrative arcs that unfurl over a number of years – like Blue is the Warmest Colour – often find it difficult to maintain relevance and, in truth, the third act does meander as we leave teenage self-discovery and enter the adult dialectic. Regardless, the quality of acting is superb, and brings the house down in some of the central scenes that drip with emotion and altruistic longing.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Matthew McConaughey’s Golden Globe winning performance makes this Jean-Marc Vallée film about the spread of HIV in the late 1980s. Loosely based on true events (isn’t every film nowadays) McConaughey plays the Texan hick Ron Woodroof who puts aside his antiquated homophobic opinions to sell beneficial drugs that the FDA (the US Food and Drug Association) deemed illegal in the States to aid fellow sufferers of the AIDs virus. Jared Leto is his effeminate accomplice and Jennifer Garner – who is, like McConaughey, in the process of reinvigorating a critically flagging acting career – the sympathetic local doctor. Their enemies are the FDA and anonymous pharmaceutical companies who harvest people’s lives to make as much money as possible. It’s the emotional journey of Woodroof who deservedly steals the limelight: he goes from electrician/cad/bull rider to a morally fibrous clandestine businessman who travels to Mexico, Japan, Israel and other places to secure the drugs his clients need. And McConaughey is that man who takes on the gruff nature of Woodroof’s character, even replicating the latter’s frail physiognomy with a severe weight loss program. Dallas Buyers Club is a heart-warming biopic of strength against adversity – over both the FDA and the fatal disease which eventually claims his life – and thoroughly rewarding watch.

Drinking Buddies (2013)

Drinking Buddies is Joe Swanberg’s new dramatic comedy, starring Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson as two colleagues who work at a brewery and events company, and their sturdily platonic friendship and how its dynamic works amidst Kate’s (Wilde) break-up with her boyfriend. It’s a film that tries to be warm and natural in its quick-fire conversational dialogue – a refining of Swanberg’s history in the inane mumblecore sub-genre – yet the characters are perversely unengaging, leaving us (yes, the royal we) cold and isolated from their respective issues. There are moments that intrigue but the heart-felt bits sag with emotive strain; Drinking Buddies is at its best when focussing on the awkward looks and body language hints that Wilde and Johnson are careful to convey. This should be a light-hearted flick and nothing more.

An Ensemble of Reviews 1

How I Live Now (2013)

Protagonist Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) is a strong-willed American with a cryptic family background and grumpy anti-authoritarian ways, who swiftly entertains a strong attraction to her floppy-haired cousin in the latter’s English countryside home. This is Kevin MacDonald’s (Last King of Scotland, State of Play) post-apocalyptic microhistory film adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s novel of the same name. London is destroyed by an off camera nuclear bomb (the aftereffects of which are viscerally interpreted by MacDonald) and the little family – two brothers, their sister, and cousin Daisy – are left alone to fend for themselves in a homage to pastoral living, a throwback to the bountiful and unequivocal innocence and beauty of children playing, minus the weighty presence of adults and their political terrorism. But the children are indicted and fragmented into the mass evacuation of south England by the military scourge. The adults tear apart the fantasy lifestyle. We follow Daisy and the little girl Piper up to a dullard family home, then their runaway journey back down to the south in a desperate bid to reunite with the lost boys. Infused throughout is the palpable idyll of the verdant country, the English forests, landscapes and streams; these images are prioritised over the grey lethargy of urban locations.

The source of danger is ever-present yet acutely abstract – the complete removal of an identifiable ‘enemy’ hinders this picture. This would be fine if MacDonald hadn’t deemed to show a scene in which the completely anonymous, seemingly apolitical ‘enemy’ can be seen shooting at children. Who are they? What are their political motivations? By introducing an alien aspect that needn’t otherwise have been there, credibility is stretched and undermined. Beyond that there is a faint absurdity surrounding the determination of Daisy, whose whirlwind romance of a few days with Eddie is enough to propel her halfway down England and treat Piper uncompassionately. It is faintly ridiculous. How I Live Now isn’t unnecessarily a bad film it just shoves pastoralism straight down your throat, like a less subtle Keats.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Aah The Hobbit 2, another sequel with an unhealthily bombastic budget and a colon in the title. P. Diddy Jackson slaps down another grandiloquent slice of Middle Earth apple pie, flatulently imbuing his cinema with saccharine set pieces and 48 frames a second, three dimensional animated VFX. Yet there is a method to the action-packed madness, a recognition and deference to the story that ultimately, and perhaps more than anything else, contributes to the fun. For a three hour film The Desolation of Smaug is considerably more faceted than the first hobbit film, with a variety of sets and challenges that the protagonists collectively encounter, with personal quests that enhance the narrative rather than distract from. Even the bits that writers Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and Guillermo del Toro wrote independent of Tolkien’s books – like the presence of Legolas (Orlando Bloom, obviously), his back story and his elven friend Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) – add to the cinematic experience rather detract, resulting in a movie that is broadly representative of a pre-Sauron Middle Earth. Martin Freeman reunites with Sherlock Holmes as Smaug, part of a laudable cast that incorporates the revolting Macchiavellianism of Stephen Fry’s Master of Dale and the stubborn poise of Lee Pace as Thranduil, among the regular crew. Fantasy respect can be re-appropriated to the New Zealander filmmakers; the decision to turn The Hobbit book into a three way film trilogy doesn't seem quite so nonsensical.

American Hustle (2013)

This represents perhaps the pinnacle of David O. Russell’s career rejuvenation after The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, sweeping the infamous actor bust-ups of years past into the ‘forgotten’ category. And this is very brilliant in its own peculiar way. American Hustle relies entirely on its idiosyncratic characters which have been constructed by writers Russell and Eric Warren Singer from the perms, flares and facial hair of the 1970s; Christian Bale is the conman Irving who has been, with partner and lover Sydney (Amy Adams), coerced into exposing and entrapping corrupt politicians by FBI ladder-climber Richie DiMaso, whose slimy predilections and desperation are expertly portrayed by vogue actor Bradley Cooper; all the while Irving’s erratic housewife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) is inadvertently sabotaging her husband’s carefully laid plans. The plot is secondary to those characters, something about taking down naïve mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), as they all dally round, contriving events and deceiving each other with humorous asides and period costumes. Hustle is so Seventies and American it’s affected and unspontaneous, something that grates a little towards the end, particularly when Lawrence does the housework whilst singing to Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. Perhaps that’s just me – because I fucking hate 1970s fashion and pop music, a debacle in the long decades and centuries of human civilisation, up there with the post-Roman Dark Ages and Forties Germany. This is eminently enjoyable, though too self-congratulatory by half.

The Selfish Giant (2013)

A depressing drama film about poverty in a Yorkshire town; written and directed by the multi-talented Clio Barnard. Two friends - one Arbor a shrimp-like street urchin with a serious attention deficiency and the other Swifty, a gentle giant from a large family with an equine spirit - get thrown out of school and try to make their own money seeking independence, to succeed in the areas which their parents and older brothers had failed. By dint of their perseverance they salvage and steal scrap metal for Kitten, the local scrapyard dealer. Swifty ingratiates himself with the latter by revealing an expertise with the horse-chariot racing that Kitten regularly gambles on; but Arbor is left behind, jealous and inadvertently pissing off almost everyone he ever meets with his blunt demeanour and naive authority. Arbor's vain attempts grow increasingly desperate putting more strain on his friendship with Swifty, until the starkly tragic ending which leaves a striking shadow. This is a grey, tawdry film brilliantly acted by the young protagonists and exquisitely directed by one who possesses the filmmaking nous, knowing when to stultify and when to penetrate, and how to sequence scenes - regularly juxtaposing between sensitive and harsh. It's one of the films of 2013, and yet remains so humble and small in its miniature intentions - to portray one tiny corner of the world, and of two boys lost in the bureaucratic cracks of modern society.

Kill Your Darlings (2013)

The American film industry is desperate desperate desperate to tap into the prevailing fondness that postmodern society harbours for the Beat Generation of the 40s, 50s, 60s - which also happened to be an unprecedented period of American glory, creativity and technological innovation when they were at the spearhead of the civilised world, sure of their white man ideals, vastly removed from the broken social ills of the modern States. The Beats were a landmark group of American men who subverted and inverted literary traditions to forge new ways of writing that was original and visceral and angsty. The principal three figures of said movement are here portrayed in this decent rendering of that period - for the uninitiated that's Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Bill Burroughs.

Previous attempts at capturing their spirit in visual cinematic form have been mixed: the Kristen Stewart On The Road immediately springs to mind, although the David Cronenberg rendition of Burroughs' 'novel' Naked Lunch was, to my mind, curious and surreal enough to be considered good (that was a semi-biographical biopic, though heavily based on some of the abstract scenes from the book). So debut director and screenplay writer John Krokidas had gumption to take on the Beat legend and wrestle it into a workable filmic framework. His portrayal had two main approaches: tackling the Beats when they were still at the University of Columbia as the New Vision, before their ideals were yet fully defined; and making Lucien Carr, an early figure in the Beat story, a central character specifically his murder of David Kammerer. These are intelligent approaches and, to a degree, work nicely.

Problems arise when the four characters - Ginsberg, Carr, Kerouac, Burroughs - are split, and Krokidas doesn't seem necessarily sure which of the men to focus on; there are montage scenes which try to centralise all. He's prevaricating to include all Beats in one singular orgy of celebration. As the end notes configure when they detail the successful lives that these men would go on to leave, apart from Carr.

Obviously the main attraction to this picture is Daniel Radcliffe playing Ginsberg. Some, like myself, have queried Harry Potter's acting ability in the past but in Kill Your Darlings Radcliffe is actually very good; he interprets early Ginsberg as a young writer with ambition though nerved out by the new philandering narcotic surroudings that Lucien Carr introduces him to. At this stage in his life Ginsberg is caught between his adult artistic lifestyle and the sheltered middle-class upbringing he's had under his poet father and mentally maladied mother. Dane DeHaan is the social renegade and homme fatale, a suave young man who whips naive fellows into the whirlwind of his life and spits them out with sexual rejection. He leans his life on figures captivated by his persona, like David Kammerer and briefly Ginsberg, and relies on the safety net they provide to live wantonly. DeHaan is good at portraying these hidden haunted characters; he's an actor set for the big lights: he did well in The Place Beyond the Pines earlier this year and stars in the new Spiderman, next.

Kill Your Darlings is a decent addition to the canon of biographical Beat movies though it never strays into the pasture of excellence, even when it uses TV On The Radio for a night-time escapade. Oh yeah there's a lot of homosexuality but it never feels strained or forced but a natural progression. Krokidas never approaches these themes awkwardly or inorganically and they are executed with delightful emotion and brio.

The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

The Place Beyond the Pines was released into the world way back in spring of this year, a kind of dramatic epic that sprawls across its 140 minute runtime incorporating three distinct acts and time periods. The first sees Ryan Gosling in his usual reticent role choosing to look stay in Schenectady to watch over his son Jason, who lives with mother Eva Mendes. But he approaches the issue of financial support in a demonstrably non-lawful manner and is shot by the policeman Bradley Cooper, who is subsequently wracked with guilt. Cooper has a son called AJ, the same age as Jason. The third act concerns their volatile, dysfunctional friendship which is ignorant of the morbid connection between their respective father's.

Director Derek Cianfrance (who also co-wrote) has constructed a very tender story set in rural town America spanning nearly two decades, infusing the stories with effervescent cinematography (by Sean Bobbitt who I am a big fan of) that furnishes every image with a staccato pungency that bristles with colour, life, deliberation, spectacle and a soundtrack that, with the aid of Suicide and Bruce Springsteen and Salem, reaffirms that.

Gosling's Luke Glanton is a stuntman attached to an itinerant circus with a talent for motorcycles, though he's limited in other areas like subtlety and job prospects; the responsibility of a son is thrust upon him by Mendes, a local girl from Schenedactady (however the fuck you spell that). Lured by the quick fixes a bank robbery could supply him and his son, Luke with his friend Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) become successful at their heists. Luke goes one job too far. He is face to face with Cooper's Avery Cross and the story is transposed to him. Cianfrance's introduction of Cross is sneaky and well executed, shifting the focus between the two characters in a convincing manner.

Cross becomes a public hero after his exploits against Glanton though he faces moral dilemmascorruption from within his own police force

Those two stories though are, in fundamental terms, the prologues to their teenaged sons Jason and AJ, played by Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen. They're both fucked up druggies with daddy issues and frequent the local police stations though Avery Cross, now an attorney or something, using his political influence to keep an eye on both of them. Self-discovery, good acting and debauched parties ensue and young Jason is left liberated yet stultified with the truth of his father - he disappears to find himself.

Whilst it may be a little length for those with shorter attention spans The Place Beyond the Pines is a very appealing movie, visually - and style is enough to keep me going for hours; in that sense I guess I'm pretty easy to please. But there is a veracity and vigour of content in here that puts a level above other style heavy pictures like Malick's To The Wonder or anything by Carlos Reygadas. I'm sorry for this review being not very good, but I'm just really tired right now. In a conventional sense it's not really finished, but I'm just going to call it postmodern (or metamodern) and publish it anyway. I ducked out a bit on the story because it's an arduous re-telling and spoiler aplenty; there's good stuff on the cinematography though... but then you don't have to like it

Permanent Vacation (1980)

Jim Jarmusch is one of those idiosyncratic filmmakers whom one only discusses in furtive whispers behind bookshelves of Proust, his curious filmography having spread almost by word of mouth. If the shock of platinum hair has always rendered him visually memorable his cinematic studies of curious unorthodox characters has become a filmic trope in American independent circles.

Permanent Vacation was his first full length feature - though even that clocks in at a comparatively lowly 75 minutes. We follow Morrissey-lookalike Ally Parker a daydreaming teenager with a furious wanderlust, both in temporal and spatial terms. Temporal because his music tastes and sartorial look is based on 50s rock'n'roll/teddy boy, slicked back hair; spatial in the sense that he is perennially walking around New York City, but with always with an eye on other places. He's searching for new experiences and locations but never with any intention of settling anywhere, a permanently fleeting spirit with nothing to tie him down. And it's something that he revels in, enjoying the disapproval others have for the manner in which he conducts his life.

Ally explores the broken urban backstreets of America encountering characters stricken by the ruthless pedagogical systems, living amongst the rubble of ruined buildings. But he decides to leave for Paris, though not before meeting an exact French replica of himself going in the other direction: both are enigmatic and laid-back, though seeking a kind of reassurance from the other that their respective cities are worthy of boots-on-the-ground exploration.

Travel, the wandering nature and resistance to a conventional life - jobs, families et cetera - are modes of living that have always appealed to me; thus I see in Permanent Vacation a beautiful idealism, a search for adventure and uncovering of the unknown that appeals to me personally. Constant itinerancy has a romance.

This debut is more a demonstration of Jarmusch's writing abilities - to capture unusual characters in episodic fashion relinquishing the restricting necessity of a plotline. It's a strange beginning to a career but wholesome and curiously optimistic.

Loves Of A Blonde (1965)

Another classic now, Milos Forman (who would later do One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) and his Czechoslovakian Loves Of A Blonde. This is a succinct tale of naive youthful romance set in a bleak Communist background. 

A factory boss is concerned that his all female workforce will become 'lonely' and unproductive without the presence of a local military regiment, and so a small middle aged force of reservists are dispatched to take up residence nearby. Three of those men attempt to coax the rather gorgeous Andula (Hana Brejchova) and her two friends at an introductory dance, but trip over themselves in some hilarious ways. Andula however is dazzled by Mila a much younger piano player from Prague; she spends the night with him instead, then breaks up with her boyfriend and follows Mila to the big city uninvited and presents herself to his parents.

Mila's parents are the quintessential married couple, taking the time honoured roles and opinions usually shared out between the husband and the wife. He is unworried by Andula's sudden appearance and is acquiescent to allow her overnight refuge at their small apartment; the mother becomes anxious over the moral destitution of her son, and blames Andula for being mislead. Mila's philandering cad-ish ways are gradually revealed and Andula returns to her provincial workplace spurned and in diminished mood. 

Loves Of A Blonde is a laudably funny film, even 50 years later. It retains the humour because it features the same relationship problems and interchanges that are universal across the spectrum of modern time, poignantly exacerbated by Forman's long drawn out scenes, whose direction is tasteful throughout. It may be twee and cutesy but not in a depletive way, it's coy but prizes naivety as a positive characteristic of youth. Glorifies and romanticises youth yet satires, fondly, it's penchant for brash action.

There is undoubtedly a political statement, subtly enfolded. It has been suggested that Andula and her friends are emblematic of the political docility of a generation grown by a system of government that has no wish for its population to become educated or aware of the world's outside of the eastern European Soviet communist bloc they reside in. Instead of campaigning for democratic liberation they chase boys and love. Deconstructing this theory, one would have to say that the opinion has been forwarded in a world in which democracy has 'won' and communism has 'lost' with, retrospectively, a clear and obvious comparison of inferiority to the lives and pursuits of contemporaneously young people in the west - i.e. by 1965 capitalist juveniles weren't slaving away in factories, mostly, but revelling in High Beatlemania. Therefore retrospective opinion puts a tendentious or slightly misread interpretation on the message that Forman may have been trying to convey. (I could probably source some Forman interviews in which he might have explicitly stated what his political intentions were for this film but I can't be bothered, because I'm not getting paid for this stuff yet therefore I can safely and legitimately write anything I want without any form of factual grounding). There is one scene of particular interest when the girls of the dormitory unanimously VOTE for a new resolution on an agreement of morality. Is this the vanguard of the winds of change or a satire on the unanmity of governmental desire for the uniformity of its people, a reflection of the communist ballots of the time - in which everyone was unanimously in favour, officially, of Soviet coercion. Difficult.

Beyond the potential political implications, Loves Of A Blonde is a luscious film of cinematic daring and execution, purposefully and effectively comical.

Jules et Jim (1962)

A long time ago I reviewed Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and decided that that should be the start of a La Nouvelle Vague series. Alas, due to many disparate and long-forgotten reasons I never followed up on that. BUT we're back with the next most famous picture that originated from that feted cinematic epoch, Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim. 

A tale that made Jeanne Moreau a legendary name in the annals of film, a movie that immortalised the buddy film. Not a buddy film forged in the retrogressive but fondly remembered style of 80s American cops but in the romantic, emotionally sophisticated Paris and verdant German countryside. The titular German Jules (Oskar Werner) and native Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre) are the closest of friends, who share literature and women in pre-First World War Paris. But like many other men of that time they are thrown about by the war, drafted, segregated and alienated from one other by the enforced boundaries of politics and war. 

Mixed up in those broader social movements is Jules' marriage to the young femme fatale Catherine to whom Jim shares a furtive passion. She is impulsive yet delectable, enviably prone to switching her exalted attention between the two stricken men at a moment's notice; and they are caught on her life affirming hook, drawn - like all men would be - by her idiosyncracies and intentionally controversial iconoclasm. Moreau plays Catherine as a woman who subverts female and romantic paradigms, able to sustain loving relationships with any man she chooses. Of course she features in some of the most famous scenes, like the song 'Le Tourbillon' which she performs for her three lovers about half way though. It's an autobiographical number that reveals precisely how she wishes to be perceived by them: as an ephemeral spirit, purposefully naive, untameable and unknowable, able to bounce fancifully from one romantic or lively situation to the next without any strings attached.

Yet her immorality and unfaithfulness eat away at her insides and facilitate her destruction; indeed Truffaut is keen to stress to inevitable victory of morality, that Catherine can only stave off the moral consequences of her whimsical, selfish actions for so long. In that sense, unlike other French New Wave films, it is an exercise in thematic idealism. Moral idealism.

Yet the film is called Jules et Jim. This is as much about the friendship of those two men which quite beautifully transcends jealousy or covetousness. Despite sharing Catherine's affection they remain as brothers. This is in part due to the soft, lenient, forgiving, indulgent (perhaps even weak) nature of Jules whose gentle love for Catherine allows her free rein to do what she pleases with whom she pleases; meanwhile Jim appears apologetic about his ardour for Catherine, the wife of his bff.

Undoubtedly a gorgeous story exploring the delicacy of affection and the tedium of a quiet life. Not Truffaut's though - this picture is based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, who had been until Truffaut's adaptation relatively unknown and even recommended Moreau for the central female role. Now he has been immortalised. The narration segments, axiomatic of La novelle vague, were lifted directly from the original manuscript.

Truffaut did not intend this to be a standalone straightforward romance however - the lives of the characters take place in a broader socio-political world which the filmmaker eludes to. The war is the most obvious, and crucial to the development of the characters. The things Jules and Jim experienced whilst serving their countries changed their outlooks, fundamentally altering the laid-back laissez-faire attitudes they used to exhibit in Paris together: they value stability and the sanctity of life above all other things, in recognition of their fortune at not being critically wounded. Of course that was something that Catherine did not go through, and she remains the intentionally naive philanderer she had been pre-1914. A famous scene is the race across the bridge with Catherine impetuously dressed in the guise of a working class man and fooling a stranger into asking her for a light. Thus Jules et Jim engages, in an offhand humorous manner, with discourses of gender and class, parodying the way in which people segregate one another. The fact that she wins their sprint race, an athletic male-dominated pursuit, confirms the irrelevancy of gender specific prejudices. And yet,simultaneously, there is a sense that Catherine and the others are naively mocking the conservative or backwards characteristics of a pre-war society that was alien to Truffaut (in terms of temporal time) and them, in terms of social class - them being part of the bourgeois elite, engrossed in bourgeois pursuits like literature and opera.

Jules et Jim was stylistically and in technical execution, a part of the French New Wave. It utilised some of the techniques that that clique vociferously advocated: narration, freeze-frames, incorporated newsreel, panning shots - yep all that boring shit that renders the resulting movie fluid, smooth and sophisticated. And of course the sexually evocative yet elusive and enigmatically aloof female protagonist, one who conforms to her own unique moral code perhaps but strong-willed, obstinate and unfathomable. Similar to Patricia in Breathless. But whereas Godard's tone is less sombre, rejecting the subjectivity of morality even implying its absurdity, Truffaut perceives morality to be a recurring feature of modernity, remaining a central tenet to civilised life. I have absolutely no wish to devolve to philosophy and discuss the emphasis the Enlightenment put on morality (as an objective force), something that was kind of banished and ridiculed in the postmodern world of the 1970s - although if I was going to explore that avenue Godard, in retrospect, was the greater social visionary. Yet this has no bearing at all on the enduring relevance and prestige and romance of Truffaut's Jules et Jim which remains undiminished in its legacy.