Bande à part: "Two in the Wave"

For fullest appreciation of Emmanuel Laurent's scholarly new documentary Two in the Wave, I suspect you'll need a pre-existing interest in the films of critics-turned-directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. The film probably counts among the least dynamic documentaries of recent times - there's something a little regrettable in the way it throws up its hands and concedes nothing it can do itself will ever match the formal ingenuities of the New Wave project. Between clips from key films and interviews from the period, there resides nothing so much as a Ken Morse wet dream: endless rostrum camera pans over newspapers and magazines representing the Nouvelle Vague's achievements - in effect, stressing the importance of words and writing in its subjects' creative pursuits - framed by the curious device of having actress-turned-filmmaker Isild Le Besco (here, presumably, to represent the latest generation of French auteurs) mutely turning the pages.

There are, granted, treasures to be derived from this wealth of archive material. Grainy vox pops reveal the French public's initial reaction to Godard's À Bout De Souffle, from wholehearted endorsements to a granny fretting "it sets a bad example" to a cinephile's more damning (and arguably, in the light of the director's subsequent enterprises, more accurate) "[Godard] despises the public. It's not serious." Elsewhere, we see Godard interviewing a wary Fritz Lang around the time of Le Mépris, and the film proves strong on the influences that were to prove doubly important on these most cinephilic of directors, who as young men used to sleep in doorways outside the Cinémathèque Française (in the manner of shoppers outside the Harrods sales, or Tim Henman fans at the gates of Wimbledon) in order to watch the whole of the following day's programming.

The contrasting personalities central to the documentary have been raked over before, in a range of biographies: Godard from aristocratic Swiss stock, Truffaut the delinquent Doinel-type "rescued" by le cinéma. What's notable is the extent to which the footage contradicts this, Truffaut appearing composed, even professorial in interview, while Godard (who, pointedly, Spielberg never thought to cast at any point) hides, awkward and scruffy, behind dark glasses and an alien accent very different from that of the gruff, twenty-a-day narrator of Histoire(s) du Cinéma. It's Truffaut who emerges as the warmer and more human in his evaluations - on Godard, he once wrote "he makes film like others breathe, only he breathes the best" - heading towards a cinema devoted to the foibles of the flesh and blood, while his contemporary, shattered by the failure of May 1968, takes refuge in radical politics and ideals, is consumed by his own disillusion, overheats and cools. Bref: Truffaut eventually came to put the pen down, but Godard, a ferocious scribbler, could never quite.

While the narration of Laurent's film - written and spoken by Antoine de Baeque, taking time off from Strictly Come Dancing - is prone to the odd flowery pronouncement ("Cinephilia is a passionate game of time"), it manages the odd observation worthy of its inspirations. "Images of May '68 seem to be images from Nouvelle Vague films," the film ventures at one point - and the cobbles Belmondo expired on at the end of À Bout De Souffle were indeed those being prised up by students to volley at the riot police. Two in the Wave is at its most evocative in describing a time when compatriots could be ripped asunder by matters of politics and aesthetics - and it finds a novel angle in presenting the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, an avatar for both filmmakers in their time (The 400 Blows, Masculin Feminin), as a child caught between two fathers, as though in a cinematic custody battle.

Léaud would, after the fallout, never be the same again - witness his own incarnation of a jaded cineaste, obliged to turn out grot in 2001's The Pornographer - but the film serves as a reminder of a moment when a performer so sprightly and charismatic could become the figurehead for a certain kind of French filmmaking. (Nowadays - hélas - we're stuck with the perma-sulk of Louis Garrel.) The fact is, whatever their similarities and differences, between them, Godard and Truffaut signed off on The 400 Blows, À Bout De Souffle, Pierrot le Fou, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Week-End and Day for Night; and however dry or formless Two in the Wave threatens to become, however much it exists in the realm of Cahiers watercooler conversation, it preserves a feel for what this actually is: a story important enough to need retelling for future generations, so that the cinema can continue to reinvent, renew, revolt.

Two in the Wave opens in selected cinemas from Friday.