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.