Setting the record straight on Jules et Jim

Kevin B. Lee is a grown man with a god-given right to think whatever he wants about Jules et Jim, but this summary begs a little correction:

Truffaut builds and expands on Jules and Jim’s vision of love as a dark descent into obsessive ownership killing off the sense of free discovery from which it sprung, while being equally deft, less ostentatious and more judicious in his stylistic approach (characterized by finely choreographed long tracking shots) to emphasize the dramatic core of each scene.

Truffaut himself on Jules et Jim:

One of the most beautiful modern novels I know is Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roche, which shows how, over a lifetime, two friends and the woman companion they share love one another with tenderness and almost no harshness, thanks to an esthetic morality constantly reconsidered.

I understand the temptation to make the movie about the tyranny of outdated psychological expectations—who among us hasn't totally wanted to marry our two best friends and be relieved of the burden of rejecting one?—but the story doesn't support it. Lee seems to think that "esthetic morality constantly reconsidered" could lead us all into paradise if only we shed our hang-ups (thinking of love in terms of "ownership," for instance), when Truffaut seems much more to suggest that esthetic morality, while less constraining than the regular kind, is hardly a recipe for total freedom. Or, really, greater freedom at all. Jules, Jim, and Catherine don't ever really abandon the free-wheeling openness that brought them together in the first place; that's the whole problem.