Emmanuel Laurent's documentary uses mostly conventional methods — film clips, archival interviews, a long-winded voiceover narrative — to tell how Cahiers du cinéma critics François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard rejected what they regarded as stuffy old-school cinema and set about to reinvent cinema by making their own films.
Perhaps inspired by their example, Laurent tries to jazz up his own stuffy movie by inserting shots of hot young actress Isild Le Besco as she wordlessly pores over old Cahiers issues, newspaper clippings, vintage photos, and ticket stubs.
But regardless of its lapses, his documentary is a reminder that at one time cinéastes could put together a formidable street demonstration, as Godard and Truffaut and their buddies did in 1968 to protest the firing of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque Française. This protest preceded by weeks the ill-fated revolutionary May demonstrations that would radicalize Godard, apoliticize Truffaut, and end their friendship forever.
