919 (60). Les deux anglaises et le continent / Two English Girls (1971, Francois Truffaut), commentary by C. Mason Wells

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Long considered a stately (read: mediocre) gender-reversing rehash of Jules and Jim (TSPDT #40), Francois Truffaut’s second foray into the work of Henri Roche is in fact his most mature and fully realized work, and one of the very best films I’ve seen throughout the Shooting Down Pictures project. Instead of Jules and Jim’s giddy, free-flying use of cinema to amplify the exuberance of its young lovers, here Truffaut’s techniques soberly and masterfully emphasize a tactile, constricting sense of place and time against which the desires of this ill-fated threesome continually struggle, charging the film with a steadily accumulating sexual tension that is never fully satiated despite two lengthy sex scenes. Truffaut builds and expands on Jules and Jim’s vision of love as a dark descent into obsessive ownership killing off the sense of free discovery from which it sprung, while being equally deft, less ostentatious and more judicious in his stylistic approach (characterized by finely choreographed long tracking shots) to emphasize the dramatic core of each scene. The narration is dominated by a voice-over that emphasizes the film’s origins as a novel, but is by no means a reversion to the cinema du papa literary adaptation against which Truffaut made his name criticizing. Narration itself is the controlling theme of the film: it is both a behavior endemic to the film’s highly literate post-Victorian milieu, and an actualization technique through which the three leads formulate their respective identities, though largely at the expense of their innocence and friendship. It is hard to think of many films that are as vigorous and heartfelt in their consideration of the two sexes’ perilous relations as friends and lovers as this masterpiece, Truffaut’s finest.

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