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Two In The Wave (DVD)
Year: 2010
Rating: PG
Director: Emmanuel Laurent
Cast: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut
Release Date: May 18, 2011
Distributor: Arthouse Films
The Film: 3.5
The Disc: Zero
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“…the sights and sounds of the New Wave reverberate throughout this documentary…”
This fine debut documentary from Emmanuel Laurent surveys the interconnected and occasionally lurid relationship of The French New Wave's twin godheads, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The filmmakers' friendship and fraternity is the stuff of legend: famously breaking into the industry as the "Young Turks" of Cahiers Du Cinema, they collaborated on one of the most influential films in cinema history (Godard's incomparable feature debut in 1960, Breathless) before falling out politically and artistically at the very moment that their youth wave washed over society.
Laurent tells this story largely through the films of the great men, meandering through lengthy clips from Breathless and Truffaut's The 400 Blows, amongst others. This proves a strong choice, as the sights and sounds of the New Wave reverberate throughout this documentary. Godard and Truffaut's peculiar A Story Of Water semi-collaboration is well-covered here, as is their relationships with famous contemporaries at home (Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer) and abroad (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles). In the end, acting mainstay Jean-Pierre Leaud (the little boy from The 400 Blows who starred in a dozen features for each) proves the catalytic element for understanding the directors' bipolar relationship, emblematic of their mutual jealousy as much as their long, shared history.
