Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/23/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971)

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Kika Markham in Two English Girls

Claude Roc: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Ann Brown: Kika Markham
Muriel Brown: Stacy Tendeter
Mrs. Brown: Sylvia Marriott
Madame Roc: Marie Mansart
Diurka: Philippe Léotard

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Production design: Michel de Broin
Costume design: Gitt Magrini
Music: Georges Delerue

Late in his life, Henri-Pierre Roché wrote two semi-autobiographical novels about his life and romantic entanglements in the artistic circles of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Since François Truffaut had his first great success as a director with one of them, Jules and Jim (1962), it's not surprising that he turned again to Roché for inspiration almost a decade later in Two English Girls. Both are about romantic triangles, though with a woman and two men in the first film, and a man and two women in the second. But where Jules and Jim is loose and larky, Two English Girls is slow and stately, its characters stewing in their frustrations and uncertain desires. Part of the difference may lie in the fact that the pivotal character in the first film is Jeanne Moreau and in the second film it's Jean-Pierre Léaud. Both are remarkable actors, but Moreau centers the film an element of mystery that gets diffused when Léaud becomes the protagonist, forced to deal with his attraction to two very different sisters. We know instantly why Jules and Jim are so fascinated by Moreau's Catherine, but in Two English Girls the difficulties among Claude, Ann, and Muriel, centering in large part on sexual morality, are not so provocatively drawn. So the tension among the figures in the triangle goes a little slack in Two English Girls, which at some point turns into a meditation on the differences in nationality and religion (or the lack of it). Roché's novel was titled Les deux anglaises et le continent, emphasizing the Channel-wide gap between the characters. ("The continent" is the Brown sisters' epithet for Claude, erecting a kind of geographical barrier reminiscent of the one between Henry James's Americans and Europeans.) Two English Girls is beautifully filmed by Néstor Almendros, and it has a lovely unobtrusive score by Georges Delerue (who also appears on camera in the role of Claude's business agent), but Truffaut's adaptation, relying heavily on voiceover narration, never overcomes a lack of dramatic incident inherent in the source. It takes patience and concentration to fully appreciate the intricacies of the relationships in the film.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel