Anne and Muriel / Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (1971 François Truffaut)

Emerging from a depression over failed love affairs with Françoise Dorléac (died in car accident) and her sister Catherine Deneuve (rejected him), Truffaut returned to beloved author Henri-Pierre Roché (Jules et Jim) and tried for a novelistic approach to film - which results in a somewhat talky hour-long exposition, rightfully though dwelling on the insufferable weight of moral behaviour which causes Claude to declare love and marriage to Muriel without having even touched her hand.

Nestor Almendros lights the cottage and rural atmosphere realistically, and it makes you reflect on how much more used to the cold were people of these times.

Anyway, we shift up a gear when Claude returns to fin du siècle Paris and starts an affair with suddenly liberated Anne, with those familiar moments of lightning editing, and changes of both scene and scenery (including a leisurely tracking shot from a moving boat) and the introduction of new characters. Then Muriel comes to stay... In the swinging of romantic fortunes between sisters, film makes me think of Woody Allen.

The moment where Almendros catches the latter two lovers against the sun reflecting water on the bow of a ship is a true and beautiful case of 'see it, capture it' (Cartier-Bresson's 'the decisive moment').

The girls are Kika Markham (with whom inevitably Truffaut had the obligatory affair) and Stacey Tendeter and Claude is of course Léaud. This was the 130 minute director's cut. And it's rather good (iris dissolve on 'good').