Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971)

Les Deux Anglaises et le continent is a French romantic film drama first released in 1971, directed by François Truffaut.  The film is based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché and stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter, Sylvia Marriott and Marie Mansart.  It has also been released under the title: Two English Girls.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


In Paris of the early 1900s, a young French dandy, Claude Roc, strikes up a friendship with a young English woman, Anne Brown.  The latter invites Claude to stay with her and her sister, Muriel, at their house in Wales.  There, Claude is initially attracted to Anne, but Anne diverts his attention towards the more introverted Muriel.  When Claude and Muriel realise that they are in love, Claude’s mother insists that they should separate for one year.  Then, if they are still in love, they may marry with her accord.  After just six months of separation, Claude writes to Muriel to say that he no longer loves her, news which devastates Muriel.  By chance, Anne meets up with Claude in Paris and the two enjoy a short-lived romance.  When Anne leaves him to pursue an affair with another man, Claude becomes depressed and devotes his energies to writing a novel.  After Anne’s death, Muriel arranges a meeting with Claude so that she can finally reveal her feelings for him...

Les Deux Anglaises was the film of which its director, François Truffaut, was most proud, but it has taken many years for it to become accepted as one of his seminal films.  In typical Truffaut fashion, it is a film which sensitively explores the cruel workings of an amour fou and can be read as a personal rejection of the new era of permissiveness for which the director had little affinity.  The film is adapted from the second novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, whose first novel, Jules et Jim, had previously been made into a film by Truffaut (to almost universal acclaim) in the early 1960s. 

The film’s gestation coincided with the bleakest period in Truffaut’s life, when, following the end of his two-year-long affair with Catherine Deneuve, he succumbed to a crippling bout of depression.  Just over a year before his breakdown and subsequent admission to a psychiatric clinic in January 1971, Truffaut had fallen in love with Roché’s second novel and invited his trusty screenwriter Jean Gruault to develop a screen treatment.  Working from Roché’s novel, Truffaut’s detailed annotations and the writer’s extensive memoirs (which were later published after his death), Gruault came up with a 500 page script which immediately cooled Truffaut’s interest in the project.  It was only after rereading Roché’s novel during his period of convalescence that Truffaut felt up to the job of making it into a film, once Gruault had subjected his voluminous script to an aggressive haircut.

It is not hard to see why Roché’s autobiographical novel had so much appeal to Truffaut.  Although it is set in another era (the first decade of the 20th century), the novel deals with themes that were central to Truffaut’s oeuvre - the destructive power of frustrated desire, the conflict between friendship and romantic love and, most crucially, the impossibility of ever having one’s emotional needs satisfied.  Like Truffaut, Roché combines old-fashioned romanticism with a surprisingly modern approach to sex, and has no time for trite sentimentality and lurid sensationalism.  In many ways, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent is the antithesis of Jules et Jim - not only does it invert the male-female roles but it focuses far more on the pains of love and is less preoccupied with its fleeting pleasures.

Before making Jules et Jim, Truffaut became very close to Roché and came to regard him both as a spiritual father and a writer of comparable talent to Jean Cocteau.  It was Truffaut’s admiration for Roché (who was 77 when he wrote his second book) which led him to adopt a literary style for the film, in a conscious attempt to capture the essence of the writer’s novel - hence the extensive use of voiceover narration (read by the director himself) and face-to-camera soliloquies.   Truffaut not only manages to imbue his film with Roché’s distinctive narrative voice, he also conveys, far more convincingly than most dramas set in this period, the torture of having to repress one’s most primitive feelings in age of puritanical self-restraint. 

As Truffaut once remarked, this is not a film about physical love, it is a physical film about love.  It is a film that shows the destructive power of repressed emotions and how love, if thwarted or manipulated, can become twisted and poisonous.  The connection with the works of the Brontë sisters is one that is easily made, and not surprisingly as the film was partly inspired by The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of the Brontë sisters’ brother.   In the film’s two heroines, Anne and Muriel Brown, it is not too hard to see a strong Brontë influence.  Like Charlotte Brontë, Muriel ends up teaching schoolgirls in Brussels, and Anne shares the same fate as Emily Brontë, dying before her time after refusing to see a doctor.   Anne’s last words ("My mouth is full of Earth...") are those uttered by Emily.  The Brown household looks suspiciously like one that may heve been inhabited by the Brontë sisters, and Anne and Muriel appear to take turns impersonating the various main female characters from the Brontë novels.

For the film’s male lead (Claude Roc, modelled on Roché himself), Truffaut had only one actor in mind: his friend and protégé Jean-Pierre Léaud.   Léaud had previously appeared in three of Truffaut’s films (and one short), playing the director’s alter ego Antoine Doinel, and had become one of the most recognisable faces of the French New Wave.   Les Deux Anglaises et le continent gave Léaud his first serious dramatic role, and one which he tackled with a surprising maturity and intensity (exceeding even Tuffaut’s expectations).  The parts of the two main female protagonists went to the comparatively unknown Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter, two young English actresses who perfectly embodied the contrasting natures of Anne and Muriel, the former passionate and liberated, the other crippled by her emotional restraint.  Léaud’s insecurity as an actor shows throughout the film, but this beautifully serves to underscore his character’s lack of moral certainty whilst emphasising the strength of the two women who are vying for his love.

Although a substantial part of Roché’s novel takes place in Wales, Truffaut was unwilling to risk another problematic location shoot so soon after his hair-raising experiences with Fahrenheit 451 (1966).  Instead, he opted to film the Welsh sequences at a private estate on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy.  The rugged stretch of French coastline is not only a perfect substitute for North Wales, providing the film with the most picturesque backdrop, it also succinctly hints at the raw passions that are lurking beneath the surface, the natural forces waiting to be unleashed.  The sequences involving the old steam trains were filmed in the Cévennes and additional scenes were shot in Paris, including the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rodin Museum.  With such a collection of stunning locations, cinematographer Nestor Almendros could hardly fail to make this one of Truffaut’s most visually alluring films, but it is Almendros’ filming of the interiors that is perhaps more interesting, the confined, overdressed sets providing a stifling sense of oppression and order that completely belies the chaotic inner turmoil of the three protagonists.  Georges Delerue’s evocative score (easily one of the composer’s best), has a similar effect, a hauntingly placid romantic melody that very subtly, almost subliminally, makes us aware of the smouldering passions that must, sooner or later, burn their way through the staid tapestry of bourgeois respectability and erupt into a blazing inferno.

As is the case with many of Truffaut’s films, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent is overlaid with  numerous auto-biographical references which are not too difficult to spot.  The most obvious point of connection with Truffaut’s own life is the sequence in which the male protagonist (Claude) succeeds in exorcising his personal demons by writing up his traumatic emotional experiences as a novel (Jérôme et Julien).  In a similar way, Truffaut was able to overcome his depression by making a film that allowed him to transfer his feelings of angst and abandonment to his fictional creations.  Truffaut was so proud of the end result that he had no reservations about claiming it as his masterpiece, an opinion that his close friends shared when he screened it to them.  Unfortunately, the critics of the time were of a different view and the film met with a torrent of bad reviews. 

Much of the criticism appeared to be fuelled by a puritanical revulsion for some of the more shocking sequences in the film - references to female masturbation, childhood lesbianism and the blood-staining of bed sheets following a virgin’s deflowering - although others judged the film to be dated and too literary, a cinematic anachronism.  This critical onslaught doubtless contributed to the film’s abysmal performance at the box office.  Whenever the film was screened, audiences (that had no doubt grown used to watching actors ripping off their clothes at the drop of a beret) sniggered in disgust at the coy love scenes.  Unable to comprehend why the film was struggling to find an audience, Truffaut hastily withdrew it and made twenty minutes’ worth of cuts, but this did nothing to assuage the critics or prevent the film from being a commercial disaster.  In 1984, shortly before his death, Truffaut re-edited the film, restoring the excised scenes.  When it was subsequently released in 1985 under the title Les Deux Anglaises, the film met with a far more favourable reaction and it has since grown in stature, so that today it is widely considered to be one of Truffaut’s greatest films, arguably the director’s most harrowing and poignant study in the ravages of repressed desire.

© James Travers 2012

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