So this is a Truffaut movie, which means French New Wave. But here we’re not on a road trip of any kind; instead, the movie follows a pair of friends (whose names, you will be shocked to learn, are Jules and Jim) in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. They travel together, they meet various women, they chat about stuff, and then they meet one particular woman, Catherine, who really becomes the animating force of the movie from then on.

And so we go on to follow them through World War I, particularly stressful because Jules is Austrian, so he and Jim are fighting on different sides, and then their post-war adult lives, which are almost entirely a complicated love triangle with Catherine.

The movie is told in a kind of distancing narration, which combines with the sweetly sad music, the (pastoral, at least post-war) setting, and the naturalistic low-key acting to establish a kind of melancholic mood. Like, things alternate between being quietly happy and more excitedly unhappy, but really throughout the movie it seems to be foreshadowing a tragic conclusion — but because the tragedy is so inevitable, it’s already emotionally accounted-for in the scenes building up to it, if that makes sense.

This is a fascinating movie, not just for the mood it establishes, but also because it takes place over a period of 25 years (just before the end, there’s a newsreel in a theatre of Nazi book burnings) and you can see not only the characters and their relationships changing over time, but also the world evolving around these characters — how they dress, what they drive, all that.