Jean-Charles Tacchella

(On Cable TV, December 2022) You could make Travelling avant a silent or dubbed film, and viewers would still recognize it as an ineluctably French film. Writer-director Jean-Charles Tacchella clearly goes after a certain nostalgic flavour in describing how three cinephiles in post-WW2 Paris (two men, one woman—you know where this is going) make their lives revolve around watching movies, and even start making plans to launch a cine-club. At the time, this means renting a theatre and charging admittance to show specific films… and why not go from there to making their own movies? The story is not headed for glory, but there is clearly something very pre-Nouvelle Vague in the way the story is structured around love and movies—as if Tacchella was mythologizing the environment in which a specific generation of filmmakers grew up. (The end title card even explicitly links unseen follow-ups to the film’s events to Truffaut, as if this was a Nouvelle Vague Cinematic Universe prequel.)  The frank discussions of sex and love and cinema can get a bit long (especially how they reveal the self-destructive tendencies of the trio), but there’s still some almost-naïve charm to the way the young characters have grand plans that blow up in their faces given their inexperience. There are a ton of cinematic references here, spanning both sides of the Atlantic. While I wouldn’t go as far as calling Travelling avant compelling, it’s a small treat for those who are conversant both in American and French cinema up to 1947, and who have a good idea where French filmmakers would go afterward.