Filmmaker and Godard enthusiast Emmanuel Laurent presents his feature documentary about the legendary filmmaker's relationship with fellow New Wave icon François Truffaut at IFFR. Geoffrey Macnab reports
2010 is shaping up as another Jean-Luc Godard year. The French auteur is due back in Cannes this year with what is being billed as his final film, Socialisme, featuring singer Patti Smith. Antoine de Baecque’s exhaustive, long-awaited biography of Godard will also be published shortly. Meanwhile, the Godard effect is being felt in Rotterdam too: the story of Godard’s friendship and eventual estrangement from fellow filmmaker François Truffaut is told in feature-documentary Two in the Wave, which has been screening this week in Signals Regained.
De Baecque scripted and narrated the documentary, which was directed by Emmanuel Laurent. “I think it would be healthy to have a new New Wave,” Laurent proclaims of his decision to make Two in the Wave now. The director argues that filmmaking today would benefit from a jolt similar to the one it received when Godard and Truffaut were first embarking on their careers, railing against 'Le Cinéma de Papa'. In the face of what he feels is conventional and complacent filmmaking, Laurent quotes a remark by Truffaut: filmmaking should be so personal and individual that “it should look like a fingerprint.”
Truffaut and Godard first met in 1949. They became firm friends and their careers progressed in tandem until their eventual falling out in the 1970s, when Godard’s politics became ever more radical. The documentary makers didn’t work with Godard directly, but were in touch with his relatives, who provided them with rare photos of the director as a young boy. “For the first time, you see Godard young! Before, you used to think that Godard was born at 20!” Laurent reflects. We also see the first photo taken of Godard and Truffaut together, when both were ardent young cinephiles attending the Festival Du Film Maudit in Biarritz in the autumn of 1950.
Two in the Wave is the story of a friendship that helped define the careers of its two subjects. As Laurent notes, they often made films in direct response to one another. “When Truffaut made Jules and Jim, Godard replied with A Woman is a Woman, also a ménage a trois story. Or, when Truffaut made Soft Skin, Godard did A Married Woman. It was always the same topic, the same subject. They kept talking to one another through their films, relating to one another.” Godard and Truffaut even used the same actor, Jean-Pierre Leaud. In films from 400 Blows to Stolen Kisses, Leaud played Antoine Doinel, Truffaut’s alter ego. Godard frequently used Leaud too, albeit in a different way. “Godard wanted to have a substitute for Truffaut in his films. We may say that Truffaut gave birth to this actor as a boy but Godard turned him into an adult. He rose to political consciousness.”
Later this year, Laurent will be showing Two in the Wave at Visions Du Reel, the documentary festival in Nyon in Switzerland. This is only a few miles from where Godard lives, but he doubts very much that the French director will attend the screening. “I am pretty sure that he is not going to like it. As a person, he is very difficult and almost impossible to handle,” Laurent confides. As a filmmaker, of course, it is quite a different matter. Laurent’s reverence for Godard is still self-evident.
More about Two in the Wave here.