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Movies => Good Movies => Topic started by: ER on October 26, 2018, 11:12:47 AM



Title: Two English Girls (1971)
Post by: ER on October 26, 2018, 11:12:47 AM
I almost put this French offering in the Bad Movies section because it's not a very good movie but this early-1970s "trying hard to be art" film does stand out as atypical enough to get a few extra points for coloring outside the lines.

I also like movies with titles that sound like a lead-in to a joke or a porn flick and this bull's-eyes that. (Actually this movie was also released by the English-language title Two English Girls and a Continental, by its original French title Les Deux Anglaises et le Continental, and upon its 1980s re-release by the simple moniker Anne and Muriel.)

If you aren't familiar with this Francois Truffaut film (and don't kick down any doors to see it) it concerns a Frenchman, Claude, who befriends a pair of English sisters, Anne and Muriel, in 1902, and a sort of love triangle rises between them, much of it at first in the form of an affair of emotion. The sisters are very different, one outgoing and artistic, the other introverted and bookish. While both sisters are virgins are the start of the story, one is voraciously heterosexual, while the other, to her shame, seems drawn to women. For his part Claude, privileged, forward-thinking, and creative, seems irresistible to the sisters, who appear blind to the fact he is a womanizer who doesn't greatly care about the feelings of others. (Trouble, girls!)

Basically this is a sex story, not a love story, a genre the French do well, and it's burdened by a little too much Frankish angst and drear for my American/Irish tastes, though if you see it as I did years ago to broaden your knowledge of the French language, it works well, since so much English is also spoken it is subtitled as well, helping in that way.

"La virginité des Anglais est un trésor, un fardeau pour les Français."

Somehow this movie reminds me of something Edith Wharton would have written had she been uncensored. It's not predictable, it does have a small wow moment late-on, but it's not involving or deeply touching either, despite some of the bad things that come to pass within the twenty years it covers.

On a Muzak scale of -2 to +14, I'd set it around a 6.