'Two in the Wave': Recapturing moments of the French New Wave

Youth was not wasted on Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who were in their 20s when they helped establish the French New Wave in the 1950s.

Both men wrote sharp critiques for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Both started their careers with short films, even collaborating as co-directors at one point, and both had international success with their first features: Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and Godard's "Breathless" ("A Bout de Souffle").

After that, things got complicated, as Emmanuel Laurent's documentary "Two in the Wave" vividly demonstrates. Their friendship was tested when Truffaut's discovery, Jean-Pierre Leaud, started to appear in both their films; Godard's work turned political in the late 1960s; and Leaud began to feel he was in the midst of a war between two fathers.

Laurent uses key film clips, music and interviews to tell this story, and the mixture succeeds for the film's first half. But the lack of key interviews gradually becomes a problem (Truffaut died in 1984) and the final stretch becomes curiously shapeless.

While it's great to see these old films looking so good (the print quality is first-rate), Laurent fails to provide a coherent point of view. If you've never seen Godard's "Contempt" or Truffaut's "Day for Night," you may be intrigued by the two directors' contrasting views of the filmmaking process. You may also feel lost.

Context is everything in a movie like this. Still, even if you feel left out at some point, it's difficult to resist the fairy-tale drama of Truffaut's triumph at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Banned the year before for his criticism of the festival, he turned up to win a top prize for "The 400 Blows."

For this episode, Laurent assembles all the right clips, clearly establishing the autobiographical nature of that film for both Truffaut and Leaud. It's a key moment in film history, and "Two in the Wave" captures it.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com