UNCUT TRUFFAUT FILM AT THE NUART

Not long before his untimely death, Francois Truffaut restored the 15 minutes he had been talked into deleting from “Two English Girls” upon its release in 1971. After so much time it’s hard to compare the two versions, but it’s easy to compare this restoration, which plays at the Nuart through Saturday, with its recently revived companion film “Jules and Jim.”

Although “Two English Girls” was a box-office failure and “Jules and Jim” became a New Wave classic, the truth is that today the “Two English Girls” seems the greater film--deeper, more mature and more involving, a major achievement in the Truffaut canon.

Both are based on novels by Henri-Pierre Roche, but in “Two English Girls” there’s a tantalizing suggestion that it’s the truly autobiographical story and “Jules and Jim” but a reworking of it. In any event, both films deal with the impossibility of love in the context of the eternal triangle; just as Jeanne Moreau flitted back and forth between her Jules and her Jim, here Jean-Pierre Leaud falls in love with two English sisters (Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter) whom he visits in Wales. This may just be the adult Leaud’s finest performance to date; certainly, he has never seemed so attractive, and his co-stars are superb. (Whatever happened to these two charmers?)

The sisters, however, do not fall in love with him in the same way or same time. For Tendeter, Leaud is a grand passion, as grand as that of Adele H. for her British soldier; for Markham, he is a more casual affair. Yet both sisters prove heroic: Tendeter in her determination to overcome her love for a man she decides is impossible for her, Markham in facing an unexpected and far bleaker fate.

Like “Jules and Jim,” “Two English Girls” is period perfect, and its late Belle Epoque milieu is captured in the warm hues of a Renoir painting by cinematographer Nestor Almendros. In both instances we are taken into a world of upper bourgeois privilege in which no one seems to have to work and therefore can endlessly contemplate emotional torment. NOTE: Showtimes printed in Nuart Calendar are incorrect; call theater at 478-6379 or 479-5269.

So charming was the 1983 “Time and Tide,” a tender, contemplative romance in celebration of love and friendship, that Shochiku was tempted to make a sequel with a new cast and crew. Although made with care, “Time and Tide II” (at the Kokusai through Oct. 30) is so slight as to be tedious. This time handsome Ikko Furuya is the proprietor of an antique shop on Tokyo’s outskirts, and the late, lovely Yuko Natori--she succumbed to leukemia two months ago--is the woman who drifted in and out his life but who now would like from him a commitment he finds difficult to give. Pleasant but definitely minor; second feature is a rerun of “Tora’s Promise.” Phone: 734-1148.

Of the films in the Arts and Film-Making series at UCLA Melnitz, the one that’s the stunner is Judith Williamson’s”A Sign Is a Fine Investment” (Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.), which actually raises in a remarkably fresh way our consciousness in regard to the socio-economic implications of advertisements and commercials in a consumer society. Williamson, whose attack on her subject crackles with unabashedly leftist verve, expands upon her key point that work has disappeared from advertising imagery (but that “work done in the home doesn’t count as ‘real’ work”). She shows that nowadays ads are designed to suggest that products take you back to nature. Amusingly, she points out that when you do see workers in a commercial--e.g, one which stresses craftsmanship as in the construction of a Rolls Royce--inevitably the product is something they could never themselves afford. This is a splendid instance of images being more than matched with words; indeed, it would be good to have another chance to see “A Sign Is a Fine Investment” to absorb more fully all that the rapid-fire Williamson has to say. Playing with it is “Shadows From Light,” experimental film maker Steve Dwoskin’s challenging homage to master British photographer Bill Brandt. Phone: (213) 825-2345.