A Holy Seduction
TWO IN THE WAVE
Directed by Emmanuel Laurent
At Film Forum May 19-June 1
Runtime: 91 min.
LET’S SAY YOU don’t know what the French New
Wave was, that you only know Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai or
mumblecore. You still owe a debt to Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc
Godard’s influence. The new documentary Two in the Wave makes
a good place to start learning about the New Wave’s significance. It
looks at Truffaut and Godard as the most emblematic directors of that
mid-20th century movement. Their respective debuts The 400 Blows (1959) and Breathless (1960)
brought fresh attitude to film culture’s conventions. Their
collaboration and inevitable falling apart reflected the rise and fade
of all revolutions and—like their greatest films—offers a lesson in the
poignancy, brilliance and fatalism that can occur in human relations.
The “complicities of a friendship” is the film’s moving subtext.
Director
Emmanuel Laurent keeps a human touch in retelling this eventful history
through a whimsical motif: Nubile researcher Isild Le Besco combs
yellowed newspaper documents and magazine clippings and visits Paris’
Cinématheque (the film hub where Truffaut, Godard and their tribe first
gathered). Laurent’s concept effectively conveys the personal allure of
this story; it is “rigorous and tender,” evoking Godard’s famous
description of Truffaut’s style. Screenwriter Antoine de Baecque (who
authored the best biographies of Truffaut and Godard) keeps the doc on
point, tracking significant moments: Truffaut’s premiere at Cannes;
Godard’s homages to Truffaut in his own films; both director’s
mentorship to the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played alter-ego for
each. The filmmakers don’t take sides in the eventual Truffaut/ Godard
split—appropriate, even-handed sympathy is displayed throughout.
Laurent and de Baecque’s allegiance pays off in the way Two in the Wave effectively transmits Truffaut and Godard’s
personalities primarily through their work: gorgeously vivid clips from
many seminal films. These prove, without argument, the great aesthetic
contribution the New Wave made to our movie heritage. Nothing by
Tarantino, Wong or mumblecore compares with the vision and humor of Jules and Jim, Masculine- Feminine or the precisely chosen moment from Jacques
Demy’s magnificent Lola that both Truffaut and Godard recognized as an
essential expression of the New Wave’s heart and genius.
After the silent era, the French New Wave (the term La Nouvelle Vague was coined by L’Express in 1957 to
describe a generation of emerging French filmmakers) is the most
important development in
movie history.
Given today’s journalistic corruption, it’s almost unimaginable that the
revitalization of film as art and political movement began with
critics. Yet Truffaut and Godard (along with Eric Rohmer, Jacques
Rivette and Claude Chabrol) were a rare breed of principled, dedicated
film critics. They took movies seriously, which is to say passionately.
Working at Cahiers du Cinema magazine and following the Catholic example
set by its legendary editor André Bazin, they wrote about films as if
they mattered spiritually, not commercially. This doc cites Godard’s
reviews as being “furiously at war with bourgeois criticism.” Inspired
by silent movie innovation, they learned: All art derives from the
urgency— and the practice—of personal expression.
Two in the Wave makes for a richly detailed footnote to a
golden age and stillgolden principles. But it’s also a winning and
necessary corrective to our current barbarous culture. Focusing on
Truffaut and Godard brings back the idea of film as the creation of
artists (auteurs) rather than the product of corporate, demographic
study and/or celebrity vehicles or adolescent wet dreams. There’s
thrilling footage of Godard quoting Orson Welles: “Art as a moral stance
against tyranny;” a humbling meeting of old/young giants when Godard
interviews Fritz Lang. By first articulating their enthusiasm for the
great auteurs of European cinema (particularly Jean Renoir), the
New Wave critics next extolled the genius of American
directors—particularly Griffith, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray,
Preminger—and then, trading pens for cameras, walked in their paths with
innovative determination. Truffaut, Godard and the gang’s Left Bank
fanaticism embraced the Right Bank sophistication of Resnais, Varda and
Malle, and they all changed the way movies were made and how modern
audiences would view and think about movies.
The New
Wavers’ common faith was to destroy cinema’s false myths. They
introduced the self-conscious approach to movie history and the
awareness of genre and form (aka modernism). That approach prevails in
the enjoyment of film as pop culture—even though it has been distorted
into either pompous elitism or politically unconscious and morally
vacuous escapism. Re-seeing so many classic clips in Two in the Wave raises
high irony about contemporary film culture’s indifference to the
classical virtues that New Wave radicals nonetheless preserved. (Their
apparent taste for literature and the fine arts bolstered their critique
of contemporary mores and politics.) There’s an eternal war between art
and commerce; even the New Wave has its objectors—and the struggle
continues. For that reason, Two in the Wave isn’t a geek fest.
It’s an affecting reading of film history as passion and personal
politics, not business.