Two English Girls 4K 1971 Ultra HD 2160p

A tragic love story about an unusual love triangle in which everyone loves two people, about the complexity of one man's love for two women.

Early 20th century. The story is about Claude, a young art critic and hopeful writer, who makes his way through life by natural charm. In Paris, he meets Anne, a free and liberated young woman who invites him to spend the summer at the house by the sea where she lives with her sister Muriel. Ann is not indifferent to Claude at all, but intends to set him up with the puritanical Muriel, hoping that he will fall in love with his sister. Her plan works, but when she herself has an affair with Claude, the situation becomes more complicated....

User Review
Truffaut famously said of Two English Girls: “I wanted to squeeze love like a lemon. And indeed, despite a certain academicism of form in comparison with the stylistic liberation of “Jules and Jim”, this film pays more attention to a kind of anatomy of love. The characters talk through their problems, analyze their feelings, reaching the last degree of frankness, as if conducting a prolonged session of introspection. Excessive voice-over commentary and verbalization of the characters' letters to each other make Truffaut's film almost Romeroesque, though without the frivolity and frivolity of the director of “Knee Claire”. The director of “Two Englishwomen...” seeks to show step by step the birth and development of a great feeling for the facets of one complete personality: like the heroes of “Jules and Jim”, the sisters Anne and Muriel complement each other, embodying what the other does not have.

The story told by Truffaut is dramatic to the last degree, the heat of passion especially in the second half is astonishing, especially given the protracted, almost hour-long exposition. At almost forty years old, the director is once again making movies about and for young people even more so than he does in “Jules and Jim.” Despite the fact that these two films seem to have simply swapped the sums, they are works about completely different problems in love: in “Jules and Jim” tells how female guile destroys male friendship, in “The Two Englishwomen and the Continent” we see the story of male infantilism, destroying women's destinies by their inability to make informed choices. In this regard, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the main role Truffaut invited Leo, making this adaptation of the novel Rocher essentially a continuation of Duanelevskih love affairs.

At the same time, in this film, the director lays in the folded form of “The Story of Adele G.”, because Muriel and in character, and in the way it is entirely given to the feeling, very similar to the heroine Adjani. At the same time, the episode with Muriel's diary, which she sends to Claude, is somewhat comical, which is basically impossible in the tragic world of the movie “The Story of Adele G.”. It can't be said that the two-plus hours of “Two Englishwomen...” fly by unnoticed, although the events are compressed in such a way that there is nothing superfluous in the plot (Truffaut and Gruot did a serious job to ensure that there were no lacunae in the script). However, there's none of the New Wave ease that distinguished “Jules and Jim” here; instead, it takes some intellectual and emotional effort to keep track of all the subtleties of the dissected feelings. The film is redundant, with too much analysis, making it seem at times rationed.

At the same time, Two English Girls is completely removed from any semblance of historical and social context, making the story hang in the air. Truffaut wants to show how love is born out of mutual interest and friendship, gradually replacing them, how disastrous separation, how traumatic for serious relationships “ideals of free love”. At the same time, in “Two Englishwomen...” there is a hint of the bohemian lifestyle, which eventually ruins love and prevents marriage from taking place. Who does Claude really love? Anne or Muriel? We will not get an answer to this question, unless we consider it the whole Duanelevsky cycle: in “Stolen Kisses” the hero Leo repeats the names of his lovers in front of the mirror, and then begins to repeat only his own name. What is this, if not the hero's confession that he loves only himself?

Leo's characters, at least in Truffaut, at least in Godard, at least in Estache, are extremely narcissistic, their failures on the love front, with all the external smarminess of their appearance, are due to extreme ego and unwillingness to give anything to others. Leo's characters are incapable of sacrificing themselves for the sake of others, for the sake of their wife and children, so they are essentially not ready for marriage. In this sense, the layout of the love triangle in “Two English Girls” was not an exception, only confirming the rule.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (55.2 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1

Info Audio

#French: FLAC 1.0
#French: DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0
#German: DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0

Info Subtitles

English, French SDH, German.