When the late François Truffaut made this film fourteen years ago, he was talked into cutting it by twelve minutes. The restoration this footage restores as well a deeper dimension to the entire film. Albert Johnson wrote about Two English Girls for its local premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1972: “One might surmise that Truffaut's Two English Girls was made due to his interest in Henri-Pierre Roché, the novelist who had written his first work, Jules et Jim, at the age of seventy-four.... Jules et Jim was the story of two men who, for most of their lives, love the same woman. Two English Girls is the story of two English sisters, Anne and Muriel Brown, who love the same man for almost twenty years. The film is a gorgeously colorful, poignant romance, as delicately ornate and rare as an enamel brooch by Lalique. Truffaut is a genius at this sort of haunting love story, and Two English Girls is cinema-perfection. Anne and Muriel are, in Truffaut's words, ‘English, romanesque, puritan and exalted.' Their emotional entanglement with a young Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is not made the subject of eroticism, but rather a passionate interplay of sentiments, sometimes amusing, often painful.... Two English Girls is called a ‘eulogy of life' by its director, but it is, as well, a reminder that the bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our minds.”
Our special thanks to Laura Truffaut Wong for making it possible to present this uncut version of Two English Girls.