Two English Girls

Henri-Pierre Roché wrote two novels. Truffaut filmed both: Jules et Jim in 1962, and nine years later Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent, which inverts it — two women and one man instead of two men and one woman, and grief where the earlier film had exhilaration. Truffaut cut it heavily on release, regretted it, and restored twenty minutes in 1984.

Claude, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, is a young Parisian aesthete who goes to stay with the Brown family on the Welsh coast around 1900. Anne wants him for her sister Muriel; Muriel is devout, myopic and terrified. The mothers impose a year's separation as a test. What follows unfolds across letters, diaries and journal entries, read aloud — Truffaut narrates a great deal of it himself — with Nestor Almendros shooting the coast and the Paris interiors in a muted, almost Impressionist palette and Delerue supplying one of his finest scores.

It is a film about desire deferred until it curdles, and about the specific damage of the era's rules for young people. Truffaut called it the most personal film he had made. Its reputation has climbed steadily since the restoration, and it now sits with The Soft Skin among the works that complicate the picture of him as the New Wave's romantic.