Two in the Wave (Deux de la Vague)

Emmanuel Laurent directed Two in the Wave (French title Deux de la Vague), a 91-minute French documentary. It is dated 2009 as a production and reached cinemas in 2011; German audiences saw it as Godard trifft Truffaut. The film follows the close early bond between two pioneers of the French New Wave, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and the way it eventually broke apart.

The story goes back to the years when both men worked as critics for Cahiers du cinéma and moves on to the loud arrival of their first features, Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless. Standing between the two directors is the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who became the movement's best-known face as Truffaut's Antoine Doinel. He appears both in Truffaut's poetic romances and in Godard's radical works, and the film shows how, during the quarrel, he became a bargaining chip on Godard's side against Truffaut. Contemporaries and colleagues such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy, Claude Chabrol and Bernadette Lafont, along with Anna Karina and Godard himself, appear through archive material.

The script is by Antoine de Baecque. Rather than shooting new scenes, Laurent cuts period recordings together to rebuild one of the key chapters of the movement.