Three buddies,all of them movie buffs ,want to create an art house theater at the beginning of the fifties ;they will run into lots of difficulties ,the harsh realities of life and of course money.Too much time is given over to the love affairs (which are not really absorbing)but all that concerns the cinema has something of Jacques Becker and his "rendezvous De Juillet"(the movie is mentioned among many others);Nino and Donald live for movies ,even in real life: in a street by night one of them remarks they could almost be in a Carné movie ("but with lousy settings !his chum promptly adds ).In the studios (the studio is still reigning ,although,whether the N.w .die hards like it or not ,Becker,Duvivier and Clément did film on location before the young turks)they are filming Delannoy 's "Le Secret De Mayerling " and they are looking for extras ,Donald runs after Duvivier's car to tell him his admiration .Unfortunately......
These youngsters 's dream would also be to make their own movie ,and they seem to invent the precept of the N.w.: a cheap movie ,with a shoestring budget ;the voice over 's final word is one of the high priests of this school.But unlike them,they do not despise the others : one can see a poster of Le Chanois's marvelous (and overlooked) "L'Ecole Buisonniere";and could you imagine one of those new Waveleters desperately searching for Duvivier?
Their first showing semi nosedives:the choice of a silent movie (Murnau's masterpiece "Der Letzte Mann")was not perhaps very attractive ;besides,when they stick up posters on the walls of Paris,they are mistaken for commies by fascists who beat them up.
Provided you like the old French cinema,"traveling avant" is a movie which will not disappoint you:it recalls the years just after the ww2,when a world was to be rebuilt ,the enthusiasm -almost 40 years after ,Tachella regains Becker's gusto-,in spite of specters looming in the background,the military service and the Algeria war around the corner.
