Two in the Wave

Two hearts! Believing in just one mind! The story is well told of two teenage cinephiles, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose eyes met across a Parisian cinema and whose passion for Hitchcock and Hawks led them to become critics and filmmakers of the nouvelle vague. But this detailed new doc, drawing on archive interviews and clips, with shots of paraphernalia and odd inserts of a young actress wandering around Paris (did they see Isaac Julien’s ‘Derek’, in which Tilda Swinton does the same?), still feels fresh and makes you want to spend all day doing nothing but hop from cinema to cinema. The film pays attention to the pair’s lesser-known works, such as their 1950s shorts, as well as signature films, ‘A Bout de Souffle’, ‘400 Blows’ and the rest. Mostly, the film celebrates cinephilia and solidarity, although it also tries to get to the root of why Truffaut and Godard fell out in 1973, with the latter accusing the former of selling out and Truffaut labelling Godard ‘a shit’ in return.