
She was at her peak in the early 60s, young enough to be sexually compelling, but wise enough to be a tragic witch. The period material, the sets and costumes, work very well in a wide-screen format, but in truth it's the lethally mercurial temperament of Moreau that holds it all together. For Truffaut, it was a perfect balancing act between wry observation and sentimental involvement with his own characters. It's an early dramatisation of feminist principles, but it's also the portrait of a bipolar personality drawn to self-destruction. The way Jules et Jim emerged was a tribute to Moreau and to Truffaut's obsession with the idea that women were magical. (In America, two young men saw it – Robert Benton and David Newman – and they began to write a script that would become Bonnie and Clyde.) Although set in the era of the first world war, its sexual manners were an indicator of the 60s to come, with Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in love with and loved by two men (at least) – Jules, a German, played by Oskar Werner, and Jim, a Frenchman, played by Henri Serre. When it opened in Paris in January 1962, it played for nearly three months and it found the same crowds all over the world.

Jules et Jim was the biggest box-office success the French New Wave ever enjoyed. Henri Serre, Oskar Werner and Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim.

Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung have that seductively heartbreaking self-sacrifice shown by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood For Love is probably the most potent, old-fashioned romance of recent times. The romantic comedy was a further refinement, almost invented in its modern sense by Woody Allen and revived by Rob Reiner with his smash-hit, When Harry Met Sally, a success that has spawned a thousand sucrose imitations.
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Movies such as Gone With the Wind and Doctor Zhivago lent something grand and epic to romantic love, but it was perhaps the much-loved weepie An Affair to Remember that did the most to introduce us to the more domestic idea of the chick flick or the date movie – the romantic film adored by women and tolerated by their husbands and boyfriends.

Romantic longing has provided the cinema with some of its most glorious and idealistic movies: Casablanca and Brief Encounter are films with an unabashed, unironic passionate flame at their centre.
