Une histoire d’eau (1961) - film review

A young woman leaves home one morning to find that the streets around her house are flooded after the early-spring ice thaw.  She borrows a canoe and manages to reach dry land, where she hitches a lift from a handsome young man.  The woman insists that she must get to Paris by nightfall, and the man agrees to drive her there.  Unfortunately, all the major roads are flooded and they are forced to to a hazardous detour across the countryside.  Whilst the woman discusses love and literature, her travelling companion seems to be more preoccupied with boasting about his car.

Shortly after making his first commercial film, Les Mistons, in 1958, François Truffaut decided to make a short documentary film about the floods being experienced by Paris at the time.  This later evolved into an improvised film, part documentary, part comic fiction, which was dedicated to Mack Sennett, the creator of the Keystone Kops.

Having finished the shooting, Truffaut had a change of heart and decided to abandon the film, partly out of sympathy for those who were made homeless by the floods.  He allowed his friend Jean-Luc Godard to use his footage to complete the film.

Godard’s main contribution was the snazzy editing and the addition of his own dialogue and narration.  The resultant film is an entertaining short film, overall baffling and challenging, but simultaneously fresh and engaging.  Somehow, it manages to capture the essence of the New Wave, with its radical construction and an almost anarchistic synthesis of the mundane and the unashamedly erudite.

© James Travers 2001

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