A Tale of Two Directors

Appearing in Wednesday's New York Times, A. O. Scott's review of a new documentary from France sent me immediately to the "save" button on the Netflix site. Two in the Wave, directed by Emmanuel Laurent and written by Antoine de Baecque, focuses on the early, intertwined careers of the two directors, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who best exemplified what came to be called La Nouvelle Vague, or the "New Wave," of French filmmaking. I can't wait to see it.

Truffaut, Godard, and several of their friends (notably Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol) were devout movie lovers who started out as critics for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Their readiness to champion such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks transformed film criticism on these shores as well as in Europe, and the group had an even more profound effect on film production when they became directors themselves. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960) were landmark works that inspired filmmakers around the world. America produced its own generation of "movie brats"—Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al—a decade later, and it's impossible to imagine that phenomenon occurring  in quite the way it did without the French New Wave that preceded it.

According to Scott's review, Two in the Wave follows Truffaut and Godard up to their infamous falling-out in 1973. "As Mr. Godard’s work became increasingly politicized, and as his always uncompromising and prickly personality grew even more so," writes Scott, "a schism emerged that would become irreparable." Apparently that's where Laurent's documentary ends. I'm not sure whether it includes this postscript: Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984—he was just fifty-two—and Godard publicly lamented their stormy split, and his own role in it, in an introduction he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters that was published some years later. It was a rather sad turn in one of film history's most remarkable chapters.

Truffaut's grave in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.