Two in the wave

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are the focal points of Two in the Wave, "the story of the friendship that changed cinema forever". In French, the 2010 documentary is entitled Deux de la vague, and only a film buff could have made such a Francocentric assertion about a pair of French directors.

Prolific Cahiers de Cinema writer Antoine de Baecque reviews the early collaboration and later fallout of two of his magazine's famed former staff, their key early movies, and their shared leading actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. The screenplay was written and narrated by de Baecque, directed by Emmanuel Laurent.

It is an unforgivably verbose and messy collage that takes almost half-an-hour to provide basic data about the two directors' family backgrounds and cinematic influences. The script, which seems to have set the aimless tone for the whole documentary, jumps around confusingly and purposelessly.

A dead-pan young French actress flips through clippings albums, a shadowy writer (possible de Baecque) looks at his computer, various faces make comments in archived material, and brief clips from some of the directors' movies pop up, rarely illustrating anything narrated in the commentary. That contains far too many irrelevant dates (of meetings) and passing names (producers, other directors) fails to note Truffaut's early death, and lurches into a very incomplete study of Leaud's work and feelings for the two feuding father-figures in his career.

There are frequent moments when a viewer is shown a factual or cinematic gem worth studying in more detail, only to have it trampled in the rush to the next non-consequentiality. So many promising documentary topics await focused attention: Andre Malraux's dominance in the Gaullist cultural machinery, his dismissal (and forced reinstatement) of the Cinematheque director Henri Langlois, ways in which the Nouvelle Vague presaged the May 1968 riots, the persona of Antoine Doinel (the semi-autobiographical boy in Truffaut's debut 400 Blows and a life-long role for Leaud), Marxism in movie-making, the then and now of other Young Turks in French cinema, the risk-taking independent producers.

Other possible topics could or should have been noted en passant, notably the love-hate complex that drives French auteurs to adore parts of Hollywood (from Welles and Hitchcock to Woody Allen) while despising its commercialism and insincerity. The narcissism of the two leading French directors and others, a form of cinematic nationalism and incest, is noted only briefly but uncritically, as is their snobbish intellectualism. Clearly, the subjects were too close to the hearts and archives of the writer and director for them to do justice to the medium or its pair of message maestros.