Jules et Jim

François Truffaut (1932-1984) shot his third feature film, Jules et Jim, in 1961. It was an adaptation of an eponymous novel by an anonymous author, Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959). The book's style and story enraptured the young filmmaker and it showed: his film was bright, cheerful, and solemn – and a hit worldwide.

The film is about the unflagging friendship between two Belle Époque artists – Jules (who is German) and Jim (who is French) – and their love triangle with Catherine (they have come to terms with moral and sexual liberty). Catherine is a modern, cultivated, attractive and sensual woman. She marries Jules. A few years later, she neglects him and has a few short-lived affairs, before taking Jim as her lover. He moves in with them, with Jules' consent. Jim confesses to her that he is enamoured of the back of her neck, which he has often stolen glances at. She exposes it so he can kiss it.

Here, Truffaut reveals something playing, for him and for Roché, a primordial role in seduction: women's hairdos. He films Catherine's nape several times, and films Muriel's nape several times in Two English Girls (1971), another Roché novel he adapts a few years later. Jim's rejoinder is actually from this second autobiographical novel, where Claude Roc, alias Henri-Pierre Roché, nicknames the young woman "Nuk" ("nape") as he is fascinated by that "white area behind the solid gold bun." (1)

Napes concealed behind hair, like genitals behind pubic fleeces, serve a powerful erotic purpose. Unveiling them crystallises desire. In Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1967), the woman posing for her painter husband lifts her golden hair, steeped in sunlight. She confidently and graciously reveals her nape before the painter's gaze, and before the director's and the viewer's more voyeuristic eyes, as they see without being seen.