Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75638 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-05-18
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
François Truffaut's adept handling of language and art, sex and caprice, is in full flower in Two English Girls, an adaptation of the Henri-Pierre Roché novel. Claude (Truffaut favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a Frenchman persuaded by Ann (Kika Markham) to come to England to meet her sister, Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). Claude falls for both sisters, vacillating between the two with a kind of Brontë indecisivenes, but he ends up asking for Muriel's hand. Complications arise, forcing all three of them to separate ends but with many reunions along the way. Truffaut said he wanted to "make not a film on physical love, but a physical film on love." He teases and taunts, making pastoral scenes erotic and erotic scenes pastoral and never loses momentum or weight with the story. Largely dismissed or ignored after its release in 1971, the film has wisely been reassessed to take its place as one of Truffaut's finest. It also includes a magnificent score by Georges Delerue (who appears briefly in the film) and stands as possibly one of the last cautionary cause-and-effect tales of the evils of masturbation and poor eyesight. --Keith Simanton

Customer Reviews

ANN & MURIEL
One of Truffaut's favorite movies of mine, TWO ENGLISH GIRLS is an adaptation of a novel from Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of "Jules & Jim", a book Truffaut had adapted 10 years before.

Two women, one man and the waltz of the misunderstandings and the hesitations dancing between the walls of a love that doesn't dare to speak. The movie features a romantic love story happening a hundred years too late, so, as always in Truffaut movies, the characters are out of focus, they live a virtual passionate love that could fill hundreds of pages of a novel but are doomed to suffer in the trivial reality of the beginning of the XXth century.

A superb musical score by Georges Delerue and a Jean-Pierre Léaud lunar as usual should tempt you even if the quality of the DVD presented by Fox Lorber is no more than average.

A DVD zone your library.

Excellent film, but flawed DVD
Undoubtedly, the film is excellent, though I don't call this a masterpiece (I'm still not sure if the narration is too much in this film). But the DVD... not too bad, but when the box tells you that it is FULLY RESTORED, you should expect more from this. A brief scene (about 1 minute) is deleted. When Anne meets Claude again, it takes quite a few days before Anne takes off her bra and goes to Claude's bed. Their conversation on the bed (in which Anne is shown topless) is missing. Some scenes also turn too dark. If you don't mind these, this is still an OK DVD.

Truffaut's Best Film
Only Truffaut could have made this film. It is very sad, but it has all his charm and tenderness, his very French appreciation of love and happiness, and his literary cast of mind. He said that he liked to make films about "the sentiments". If that was his goal, this was his best film.