Two English Girls

dir: François Truffaut

R, 130 min.

Playing Friday and Saturday at Sarratt Cinema

First loves are haunting, as much for the immediacy of the initial rush as for the inevitable mellowing and fading of memory. For me, the sensation of falling in love will always be associated with the movies of François Truffaut. I was 15 and a high-school sophomore when a local college professor let me attend her screening of Truffaut’s 1960 crime-thriller reverie Shoot the Piano Player. It’s an ideal movie to see when you’re just starting to comprehend the vast possibilities of cinema: a fizzing brew of elevated technique and low comedy, lyrical tenderness and sudden violence. I came away with a lifelong love of movies and an awkward crush on the teacher in the bargain.

By that point, it was too late for me to grow up with Truffaut’s movies in sequence, the way young cineastes had done in the 1960s. (The closest equivalent for movie geeks my age was Woody Allen, who caused similar feelings of affection and frustration that went beyond mere appraisal.) But by starting with his first feature, 1959’s The 400 Blows—an autobiographical account of his delinquent childhood, made less than 10 years after the director was out of his own teens—cinephiles could’ve charted their development against that of Truffaut and his frequent leading man Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played the director’s alter ego Antoine Doinel from adolescence (The 400 Blows) to adulthood (1979’s Love on the Run).

Throughout those years, moviegoers could see their own romantic yearnings reflected in Truffaut’s films. Disarming trifles such as the Doinel films Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board made sweet sport of callow passion and indecision, and no movie has ever captured the exhilaration of young love as piercingly as his 1961 classic Jules and Jim. Yet for all their beauty and lyricism, Truffaut’s films are profoundly marked by a sense of the ultimate folly of romantic love. That he addressed this theme in some of the most stunningly romantic movies ever filmed—such as Two English Girls, which shows Friday and Saturday at Sarratt—is a fascinating paradox.

When released in 1971, 10 years after Jules and Jim, Two English Girls was treated as a holding pattern in Truffaut’s career, as if the director were so starved for ideas that he felt a simple gender inversion of Jules and Jim would do the trick. The comparisons are certainly there. Two English Girls is based on the only other novel Henri-Pierre Roché published besides Jules and Jim, and indeed it too concerns a love triangle. And like Jules and Jim, it’s a study of love among impulsive, artistic intellectuals in the years surrounding World War I—a love that ultimately ends in death and solitude.

Where Jules is among the most fleet and freewheeling of films, though, Two English Girls is a work of quiet, somber, and devastating power. Like Hitchcock’s Marnie, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, it was unjustly slighted at the time it came out, in part because it didn’t deliver what audiences expected of its maker. Truffaut did himself no favors by shearing it of 14 minutes, which could only have destroyed the movie’s cumulative urgency. But the 130-minute version he restored just before his death in 1984 is a glorious thing: the ultimate expression of his theme that perfect love may be unattainable, but life without the attempt is untenable.

Two English Girls traces the lengthy relationship between a young Frenchman, Claude Roc (Léaud, more hesitant and birdlike than ever), and the Brown sisters, Anne (Kika Markham) and Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). During a visit to Claude’s mother, Anne suggests that he visit their country home in Wales. Claude is taken by Anne, but she sees him more as a mate for Muriel, who spends most of her days protecting her fragile eyesight. Nevertheless, it’s as a flirtatious, endlessly curious threesome that they’re happiest—the sisters grill him about his experiences at a bordello, and he’s charmingly shocked by their request that he take them sometime.

Once the girls’ mother gets wind of their frank talks, though, she banishes Claude to a neighbor’s house. As always in Truffaut, isolation and restriction are a can’t-fail recipe for obsession. Suddenly Claude falls in love with Muriel, who rebuffs him. He courts her ardently by letter. Their mothers, flustered, agree to enforce a year’s separation between the budding lovers; at the end of that time they can marry. In a wrenching passage, Truffaut contrasts the passing of months for Claude and Muriel. Back in Paris, his attentions have drifted elsewhere. She dwells in sleepless agony, driven to inexpressible rage and despair over his letters.

In time, Anne will become a sculptress, and Muriel will become a teacher. Claude will always love the two sisters, who represent intoxicating extremes of romantic possibility—free love and obsessive devotion. ”To choose between two things, you must know both,“ Muriel tells him early on. ”I can’t choose vice or virtue knowing only virtue.“ But Claude will never be able to choose between Anne and Muriel. And none will love the other as much, at any given time, as he or she is loved.

As Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana’s recent biography of Truffaut observes, the director himself was haunted by two sisters: Catherine Deneuve, who had broken off a brief but intense relationship with Truffaut just before the filming of Two English Girls; and Françoise Dorleac, the star of his The Soft Skin, whose untimely death in a 1967 car accident saddened him. Whatever the cause, the movie has a sustained, sorrowful gravity that’s rarely present in his early films. In Jules and Jim, Truffaut’s whirling camera transmits the fleeting passions of his characters straight to the viewer, which makes the movie’s closing tragedy a real shock. It’s a young man’s idea of the impending ravages of time: the suddenness of loss without the heaviness of loss.

In Two English Girls, the sense of impending grief, for loves that cannot last, is a lengthening shadow. Thanks to the breathless narration, read by Truffaut at the pace and pitch of an auctioneer, we’re always told what the characters are thinking and feeling. With that knowledge, though, comes the awareness that their idyllic passions will inevitably fade. Throughout much of the film we’re kept at a literal distance from the characters: The lovers are specks against the rolling hills and seascapes.

But Claude, Anne, and especially the religious Muriel are also prisoners of the uncertainties of the time. Two English Girls is set in the period of transition near the end of the Victorian era and the birth of modernism. (As if to signify this clash, Truffaut uses compositions as formal as 19th-century landscape paintings alongside spanking-new techniques from the onset of silent cinema, like the irises that zero in to end scenes.) The period isn’t repressive enough to stifle the characters’ curiosity about sex, but it isn’t permissive enough to let them live as a menage à trois, either. Yet even as we witness the contrast between 19th- and 20th-century values, the movie’s intensity of feeling is inseparable from its period detail. It has a depth of emotion born of a world with fewer distractions, when the smallest of social gestures was endlessly parsed for hidden meaning.

When I was in my late teens, I adored Jules and Jim but couldn’t make it through a chopped-up video of Two English Girls. I love them equally now. The speed and whirling beauty of the former makes the latter even more poignant; the sad, persistent ache of Two English Girls makes Jules and Jim seem even more buoyant. To choose between them would be to choose between your first and greatest loves—between the one that taught you how to feel, and the one that’s all the richer and deeper for the memory of the other. Unlike Claude, we can choose them both.

—Jim Ridley

Dispatches from under a darkened marquee

♦ What is up with the summer movie release schedule? Two weekends ago, the only major Hollywood releases were Mission: Impossible 2 and Shanghai Noon; this past weekend saw Big Momma’s House standing alone; and next weekend will offer Gone in 60 Seconds as the sole new Hollywood product. The beneficiary of the major studios’ fear of getting clobbered by M:I-2 may be Martin Lawrence’s broad, sloppy comedy. Not that it wouldn’t have been a hit anyway—the trailer has had audiences in stitches for months—but one wonders how the numbers would have looked if Big Momma had opened against M:I-2, and Shanghai Noon had this past weekend all to itself. More and more, big box office seems to be a result of timing as much as quality...especially when the competition fails to show up.

♦ Speaking of Big Momma’s House, there are a few big laughs in the film, but the picture as a whole suffers from improvised scenes that lack wit or snap, and from director Raja Gosnell’s inadvertent killing of gags by failing to show clearly the subject of the joke. The major exception? Martin Lawrence’s church speech—in his ”Big Momma“ makeup—that develops into a full-scale rendering of the gospel classic ”Oh Happy Day,“ with uproarious dancing by the comedian. It’s amazing what a good dance sequence can do to goose a lackluster movie.

In addition to the unfairly panned Center Stage—which was almost all dance sequences—this year has seen redemptive hoofing in the unlikely locale of The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, which ends with an energized production of the title song. I know Evita was an artistic and financial fiasco, but nevertheless, it’s time to revive the live-action musical. There’s still nothing quite as exciting as watching graceful, charismatic people sing and dance onscreen.

♦ The talk of Hollywood watchers these past two weeks has been the surprising performance of Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks at the box office, given the slight returns on his product of the last decade or more. Some credit the marketing by his new studio home, Dreamworks, and others credit the fact that Small Time Crooks is an out-and-out comedy, but the reason why Woody is suddenly a modest moneymaker is much simpler: His film is rated PG.

After five years or so of increasingly vulgar PG-13 comedies—which valleyed last year with the often disgusting Austin Powers sequel—parents are looking to take their kids to films that are a little safer. That same rising tide floated Galaxy Quest last December and made it a hit despite lackluster marketing by the studio (Dreamworks again, oddly enough), and despite a premise that was never going to sell to the lucrative teenage market. There’s still gold in bodily-fluid jokes, but studios may soon find that family-friendly alternatives that aren’t animated are worth at least a little silver.

—Noel Murray

Soul surgeon

Maybe it’s because his movies require active thought on the part of the viewer; maybe it’s because they’re sometimes forbiddingly grave and intense. For whatever reason, when a lot of ordinarily adventurous moviegoers hear the name Ingmar Bergman, they react like kids bristling at the mention of spinach. But amidst so much current cotton candy, it’s refreshing to encounter the austerity and psychological acuity of Private Confessions, which opens Friday at the Belcourt.

Scripted by Bergman and directed by his longtime collaborator, actress Liv Ullmann, Private Confessions is the last of a trilogy of autobiographical films about Bergman’s childhood: The Best Intentions concerned the courtship of his parents, while Sunday’s Children portrayed his relationship with his stern Lutheran minister father. Taking its title and its central motif from Luther’s version of the Catholic confession, this 1996 film is organized as a series of five two-character conversations centering on Bergman’s mother Anna (Pernilla August). In the first, set in 1925, she confesses to her spiritual adviser, Uncle Jacob (Max von Sydow), that she has betrayed her minister husband with a lover, another theologian.

The subsequent conversations aren’t shown in chronological order: The second shows what happens after Anna follows Jacob’s advice to tell her husband Henrik (Samuel Froler), while the third skips backward to show Anna’s initial tryst with her lover Tomas (Thomas Hanzon). In each case, except for Jacob, the men fall back on religious stricture to deflect their own weaknesses, while Anna at least shows the courage to suffer the consequences of her choices. Each new conversation reveals another level of intimacy, stripping away the privacy of sex, of confession, of death.

August, best known to stateside audiences as Luke Skywalker’s mother in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, is a revelation in her demanding role. But as Uncle Jacob, Bergman’s questing knight Max von Sydow holds the screen in a vise; he exhibits a solemn serenity that’s the personification of grace. The actors hold director Ullmann rapt, and she rewards them and us with an unblinking gaze: The intensity of these two-person dialogues puts most thrillers to shame. The best reason to see Private Confessions may be the reason people fear Bergman’s best films: They force us to look beyond the screen into our own hearts.

—Jim Ridley