Two English Girls

Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent, 1971) is François Truffaut's melodrama, available to watch online on iFILM. In the early 1900s a young Parisian named Claude meets an Englishwoman, Anne, who invites him to spend the summer by the sea with her family.

Anne's plan is simple: introduce Claude to her quiet, devout sister Muriel and see them happy. It works too well — Claude and Muriel fall for each other. But the families demand a year apart before they'll bless a marriage, and over those months the feeling is tested by distance, letters and doubt. Anne's own place in the story shifts along the way. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays a man caught between two sisters, unwilling to let go of either.

Truffaut adapted the film from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché — the same writer behind Jules and Jim. Néstor Almendros' camerawork and Georges Delerue's score turn the love triangle into something close to an ache: a narrator reads from diaries while the years count off missed chances. It's made for lovers of the French New Wave and slow stories about love that arrives at the wrong time. Stream Two English Girls (1971) online on iFILM.