Film history arranges itself into movements and places; one pivotal moment happened in the early 1960s in France.
The French New Wave shook up the old way of doing things, made movies younger and edgier, and introduced a generation of filmmakers to the world scene. Those filmmakers then influenced everybody who came in their wake.
A new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” uses archival footage to tell a very condensed story of two of the most famous directors to emerge from the French New Wave: Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
In 1959-60, Truffaut released “The 400 Blows” and Godard released “Breathless,” a one-two punch that set the movie world atwitter. The two men had been friends for years, fellow film critics for the Paris magazine Cahiers du Cinema, and they worked and advised on each other’s projects.
That relationship continued through much of the decade, and in 1968 they joined together to shut down the Cannes Film Festival while the rest of France was reeling from the tumultuous protests and strikes that were paralyzing the country — an act that had powerful symbolic weight.
But as the movie suggests, their relationship was already fraying, pointing out some fundamental differences between the two. If ever the movies had their version of John Lennon and Paul McCartney — two gifted artists and friends who had very different personalities — Truffaut and Godard were it.
Truffaut had been born poor and illegitimate, and bounced around reform school. Godard was raised in privilege, on the shores of a Swiss lake. Yet both lives were given definition by their intense relationship with cinema. So much so that, as Godard said, “When you cease to love the same films, the friendship dies.”
It was more complicated than that: Godard was off making increasingly political essays disguised as feature films (and after a while, not even disguised), while Truffaut enjoyed his share of box-office success and even Oscar attention.
“Two in the Wave,” directed by Emmanuel Laurent, summarizes this friendship, but might have gone deeper. It’s great to see archival footage from the ’60s, and Laurent weaves in the story of the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, an alter ego of Truffaut’s who also worked for Godard.
But it’s not quite compelling enough, and the letters sent in a bitter split between the two directors in the early 1970s are only fleetingly quoted. This is one of those times when a dramatized version of the story would serve better than this docu-look.
Still, it’s a great era, and a good summary for anybody with even a casual interest in European films. Truffaut died young, in 1984; Godard is still making movies and causing controversy. One wishes they were both still battling it out.
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