Two English Girls (1972)

Must See Movie...

Did you people see the same film I saw?

best movie i've ever seen.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Growing up, I eagerly saw each new Truffaut film when it opened in the United States. This one had the biggest impact on me of all.It's interesting seeing the dichotomy in the reviews here: about half call the film melodramatic, pointless, and dull. The other half find it beautiful, touching, even a masterpiece.The flaws are easy to pick out. Leaud is awfully low-key to the point of blandness, and the (thankfully) few English language scenes clearly suffer from Truffaut's unfamiliarity with the language -- he failed to catch some really bad English line readings.But the narration totally works for me, giving the film the "tempus fugit" feel of a great nineteenth century novel. The purposefully rushed, monotone narration keeps the story from becoming overly sentimental. The voice-over sounds like the cold wind of Fate, sweeping the characters through the years from naive youth to the disillusionment of early middle age.I think one's response to the film has a lot to do with one's own nature: if you have loved passionately and experienced serious heartbreak, you may really GET this movie. If you're a cynical hipster who is simply embarrassed by passion, romantic love, and strong emotions, it's not for you. This is a highly emotional film for highly emotional viewers.Muriel's letter scene will divide these two groups of viewers. Some posters here call it laughable and ridiculous, perhaps because they're sexually immature or repressed, so the topic of masturbation automatically gives them the giggles. To me, this scene is heartbreaking, when you realize this poor young woman's guilt over masturbating has warped her life and spoiled her chances for happiness. It shows how a small misunderstanding or character flaw can lead to loneliness or lifelong unhappiness.This film affects me more strongly than the more famous and acclaimed JULES ET JIM, where the characters' actions strike me as more peculiar and clinical than moving. But that's just me.Few films give such a strong sense of time passing as this one, and life running through the hourglass as we poor human beings bumble, blunder, and suffer as we search for love.The final scene of an aging Leaud walking through a changed Paris he hardly recognizes as the city of his youth is unforgettable, justifying the movie's length. With a shorter running time, the film could never give you such a sense of time passing, characters growing, changing, and missing chances for happiness.For those who respond to it, this is one of the most beautiful, affecting films of the 1970s.

Puzzling and somewhat pointless drama from Francois Truffaut has a young Frenchman at the turn of the century traveling to Wales to meet with his new girlfriend and her family; once there, he finds himself falling in love with his girlfriend's troubled sister (seems sis is a bit neurotic about her own virginity, wearing it both as a badge of honor and as an angry embarrassment). Dulled-out, inert rumination from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, though many critics gave it raves. Hurt overall by colorless performances, bad art direction and a severely long running time. Truffaut added more footage for a 1984 re-release, taking it from 108 minutes to a now-astounding 132 minutes. *1/2 from ****

This movie is based on a novel. This is a very important fact. The opening credits show us the novel, presumably so that we will all know what a book looks like. To emphasise the fact that this is a movie based on a novel, there is lots of narrative voice-over. The voice-over is helpful for those of us who cannot see the screen. It describes what is going on on screen, and it also describes what is going on in the characters' minds, presumably because for some reason the director has no other means of letting us know what is going on in their minds. And the voice-over is rather tedious just like the way I'm writing this is tedious. No, seriously, it's awful. The French guy is staying with the two English girls and their mother, and as the camera shows us 1 French guy, 1 English girl, and 1 mother at dinner, plus 1 empty chair, the voice-over tells us the other English girl isn't there. We watch them eat in silence. The voice-over tells us they ate in silence. It got to the stage where the voice-over said something about them (out for a walk) coming to a rushing torrent. My own personal voice-over said "If I see a rushing torrent in the next two seconds, I'm out of here". Bingo! Of course, this all wouldn't be so bad if the story itself was particularly interesting, but, as judicious use of the fast-forward button made clear, it's just your standard tedious French drivel that claims to have the last word about human relationships. Some movie adaptations you can dismiss as "better off just reading the book", but with this one you're better off reading a book on a different topic by a different author. (Note added later: I subsequently have seen a couple of Eric Rohmer films and didn't like those either! So I concede that there's a particular type of movie that I hate: the French philosophical relationships movie).

"Two English Girls" is a lyrical, amusing slice of Truffaut's unique vision and style of filmmaking. Like all great artists, he can shift his tone from lushly romantic to deadpan comic, from poetic to amusingly prosaic without missing a beat, and all the while keeping his story all of one piece. If you love Truffaut's voice, you'll love this film - charming, personal, light-hearted, with a touch of melancholy. Beautifully filmed, ably acted, with Leaud playing his benign cad so well.