Truffaut has written, "Once a picture is finished, I realize it is sadder than I meant it to be," but with Two English Girls he must have had the realization while he was shooting the picture, because he keeps trying to cover up the sadness with pat bits of gentleness and charm—his stock-in-trade. Yet what is intended to be light lacks the requisite gaiety; everything is muted, almost repressed. (p. 18)

The movie of Jules and Jim was about wrecked lives, too, but wildly wrecked and so intensely full of life that the movie had an intoxication all its own. Here, despite the links to that earlier film and occasional references to it, the exhilarating spirit has flickered out, and we can't be sure how much of the change is intentional, how much uncontrollable. The movie meanders, following the characters' endless arrivals and departures and changes of mind...