Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (no 14)

by Allan Fish

(France 1971 132m) DVD1/2

Aka. Anne and Muriel/Two English Girls

I am a puritan in love

p  Marcel Berbert, Claude Miller  d  François Truffaut  w  Jean Gruault, François Truffaut  novel  Henri-Pierre Roche  ph  Nestor Almendros  ed  Yann Deder  m  Georges Delerue  art  Michel de Broin  cos  Gitt Magrini

Jean-Pierre Léaud (Claude Roc), Stacey Tendeter (Muriel Brown), Kika Markham (Anne Brown), Sylvia Marriott (Mrs Brown), Marie Mansart (Madame Roc), Philippe Léotard (Diurka), Irene Tunc (Ruta), Mark Peterson (Mr Flint), David Markham (palmist), Georges Delerue (Claude’s agent),

There’s quite a sadness to be felt at the thought of how François Truffaut is perceived by the average person of my generation who calls themselves a film buff.  If asked about Truffaut’s contribution to the cinema, they would very likely mention his performance as the scientist in Spielberg’s Close Encounters.  Forgive me for saying this, but that’s like saying Orson Welles should be remembered for appearing in whisky commercials.  That cameo came late in Truffaut’s career, with for me all his great films as a director behind him.  And though Les Quatre Cents Coups and Jules et Jim are definite masterpieces of cinema to be covered later in this list, Deux Anglaises is his greatest and richest film.  Like Jules, it’s based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, and concerns a romantic ménage à trois in the early years of the century, but this time between two women and a man.

            Claude Roc is sent for a holiday with his mother’s friend in Wales, where he encounters her two daughters, Anne and Muriel, having met the former in Paris.  Over the following weeks, he becomes intoxicated by their presence and realises they are destined to play a large part in each other’s lives.  But does he prefer the more open Anne or the staid, puritanical Muriel, who reserves her emotions behind dark glasses?

            Though the central triangle is subtly developed, many have decried Léaud’s passivity as Claude.  Yet in many ways that is the central premise to his character.  He is captivated by the sisters’ beauty, but as a spectator, not a participant.  Like the eternal artist, he observes without being observed and, like Truffaut himself in his distanced narration, he fails to connect his feelings.  It’s this suppression of feeling that not only embodied the world of the belle époque, but its protagonists, and thus contriving to make the inevitable love scenes between Claude and the two sisters all the more emotional and tender.  Indeed, the scene where he finally consummates his love for Muriel is climactic in more ways than one and filled with a longing, touching truth.

            Many have called Truffaut’s work Proustian, and not without reason, with its emotions and period perfectly in tune with the rhythms of that most eclectic of authors.  But there are countless literary references throughout the film, from Hugo to Dickens to Zola, and the décor and visuals have more than a touch of the Impressionists about them.  Nestor Almendros’ photography is truly magical, not only in Paris and the gas-lit interiors, but in the gorgeous exteriors of the Welsh coastline, once again proving his uncanny ability to capture something in a foreign land that others could not (think of his mid-west in Days of Heaven and his Pacific rainforests in La Vallée).  Delerue’s music is, as usual, integral to the piece and the actors interpret the characters’ emotions perfectly.  Léaud deliberately remains a cipher, representing Truffaut himself by proxy (much like Mastroianni to Fellini), but Tendeter and Markham are mesmerising and haunting as the sisters, Almendros’ camera framing their faces in gorgeous close-up and distant iris outs.  They represent the British fascination with things foreign (“the British are less open but have a logic and fantasy of their own” we are told), and the coldness of the emotions that surface, rather like the countless sculptures that permeate the film, including a wonderful display of Rodins in the last act.  It may not be for everyone, but it’s an intoxicating trip into the follies of love and the price of seeing life through an artist’s eyes and the summation of its director’s career as a film-maker.