Two in the Wave

Synopsis: The French New Wave crashed onto international shores when François Truffaut's debut feature, THE 400 BLOWS, premiered at Cannes in 1959, followed quickly by Jean-Luc Godard's equally thrilling BREATHLESS, based on a Truffaut story. The two filmmaking rebels, great friends and fellow graduates of the Cahiers du Cinema, for which both wrote extensively, hailed from different sides of the tracks: Truffaut, a poor reform school boy, and Godard, a Swiss haute-bourgeois. Both cast Jean-Pierre Léaud in many of their movies (for Truffaut, as his alter-ego, Antoine Doinel) and led the movement to save Henri Langlois's job at the Cinemathèque Française in '68. TWO IN THE WAVE poignantly melds revealing period footage of both men (and of Léaud, torn between father-figures) with scenes from some of their greatest films, as it moves inexorably toward their bitter falling-out.     Source: Lorber