Jules and Jim

Cinema's best-known ménage à trois starts gaily and ends in tragedy. Truffaut's lyrical construction and Raoul Coutard's brilliant cinematography combine to make the story's restlessness a physical property of the film. "There are two themes," Truffaut said, "that of the friendship between the two men, which tries to remain alive, and that of the impossibility of living à trois. The idea of the film is that the couple is not really satisfactory but there is no alternative."