Two English Girls 4K 1971

A tale of love, echoing with such nostalgic tenderness the geometric construction of Truffaut's then ten-year-old film 'Jules and Jim' begins in the spirit of Victorian pastoral romances. Claude, an unsophisticated young man, is being educated and tutored by Anne, a personal English teacher from England. She invites him to stay with her family for a few weeks, where she introduces him to her sister Muriel, making every effort to make them fall in love. The action develops leisurely, the story multiplies with a great number of innocent scenes where the three characters spend time together.

We observe the mores of the era (the story takes place at the dawn of the 20th century), the gentlemanliness of Claude, the cautious curiosity of the girls, who are keenly interested in their beau, but desperately hide it from themselves and from him. Behind Almendros's staid picture, the editing, so simple and, by today's standards, as if slow, yet it sets a rhythmic pattern to the narrative, helping to express the thoroughness with which the director undertook his work. In the mise-en-scene, in the acting, in the concise yet skillful setting of the characters. It seems as if this story will remain like that - about old mores, about unspoken feelings raging inside.

In the second half, however, Truffaut turns morality upside down, as postmodernist writer John Fowles did in his novels. Genre vignettes are replaced by a powerful, ever-increasing flow of events and circumstances in which Claude, Anne and Muriel find themselves, gradually transforming their extraordinary love triangle into one of the most beautiful constellations in the universe of cinematic characters. At the same time, Truffaut hardly changes the pace and rhythm of the story.

Without shocking or epathetic details Truffaut shows in his film the final breakdown of Puritan morality and the transition of society to the behavioral models of free relations of secular Europe in the modern era. To view this phenomenon outside the context of revolutionary changes in culture and the visual arts is a thankless task, so Roche and Truffaut make their characters educated and enlightened people. Claude is a critic and writer, Anne a sculptor, Gyorka a publisher, Muriel an educator. They are far from peasants, but they are not high society either.

However, it is obvious that no social upheaval interests the director as much as the intertwining of destinies in the stories of the three characters in this two-hour movie story. Here melodrama is juxtaposed with heavy psychology and frank confessions, similar to episodes of Bergman's 'Autumn Sonata'. Chamberlaincy of furnished rooms - with the upheavals of society. Love - with cynicism.

To all this, it is also a great subtle movie with the handwriting of the French master, especially for lovers of classics.