Two in the Wave

This post kicks off a retrospective of the work of Francois Truffaut. I have written about his debut film, The 400 Blows, and now I will undertake to see the rest of his work, or what's available on DVD. Some of them I have seen before, some not.

Two in the Wave is a 2010 documentary by Emmanuel Laurent on the relationship between Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, two of the major directors of the French New Wave, that explosion of filmmaking in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The two were rivals, but also close friends and colleagues, until they irrevocably broke and became enemies.

The film is not terribly probing. It covers Truffaut's glory with The 400 Blows at Cannes in 1959, while Godard was stewing back in Paris. But Truffaut gave Godard the story that would become his stunning debut, Breathless. The two would write and produce for each other throughout the '60s.

But, after Truffaut made Day For Night in 1973, Godard wrote him a scathing letter of offense. Truffaut had always been a more traditional filmmaker, while Godard was becoming ever more radical, both artistically and politically. Truffaut was a distinctly unpolitical filmmaker. This letter, which Truffaut answered in equally scathing terms, severed their relationship, and they never spoke again.

The film also covers, sketchily, the history of the New Wave, fleetingly discussing Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and the first director of the movement, Eric Rohmer. Of course Andre Bazin, the editor of Cahiers du Cinema, is also mentioned, and a young woman is shown reading old issues of that groundbreaking magazine. The New Wave directors were critics who were disgusted with the bourgeois and dull French cinema of the '50s, and admired daring Hollywood directors like Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and especially Alfred Hitchcock, whom Truffaut flattered into giving him a book-length interview.

The French intelligentsia were so enamored of cinema, that in 1968, when the head of the Cinémathèque Française was removed, a riot ensued. Certainly nothing like that could occur in the U.S.A., which could use its own New Wave right about now.

Though this film does not go deeply enough into the subject matter (what exactly constituted the "New Wave?" What did it mean, exactly, for Godard and Truffaut to be enemies?) the film is a nice summary of their work, with plenty of clips from their films.