Day for Night (French: La Nuit américaine, lit. 'American Night')
Is a 1973 romantic comedy-drama film co-written and directed by François Truffaut.
In between are several vignettes chronicling the stories of the crew members and the director, Ferrand, who deals with the practical problems of making a film. Behind the camera, the actors and crew experience several romances, affairs, break-ups and sorrows. The production is especially shaken up when one of the supporting actresses is revealed to be pregnant.
Later, Alphonse’s lover leaves him for the film’s stuntman, which leads Alphonse into a one-night stand with Julie; thereupon, mistaking Julie’s pity for true love, Alphonse informs Julie’s husband of the affair. Finally, Alexandre dies on the way to hospital after a car accident.
Day for Night
The second reason for the success of Day for Night is that Truffaut has devised his story not, in the manner so often adopted in films about film-making, as a way of presenting the problems and the absurdities of simulating reality but as a way of looking at people at work. The comedy of technical trickery is there — the view from an upstairs room which is no more than a single wall perched on a platform up a ladder; the fake snow pumped over streets and trees from a gigantic hose. But it is only a background to the comedy or the drama of behaviour. The foreground is held by the film cast and their director.
The movie is just plain fun. Movie buffs will enjoy it like “Singin’ in the Rain” (that perfect musical about the birth of talkies), but you don’t have to be a movie buff to like it. Truffaut knows and loves the movies so much he’s infectious; one of “Day for Night’s” best scenes is a dream in which the adult director remembers himself, as a little boy, slinking down a darkened street to steal a still from “Citizen Kane” from in front of a theater. We know who the little boy grew up to be, and that explains everything to us about how he feels now.
Day for Night achieves a remarkable floating point of view, drawing audiences into its irresistible network while it points out both the folly and the ease of picking out any one focal point for the story. It also works wonderfully at conveying the mixed frustration and absorption that obsessiveness in general, and filmmaking in particular, can produce. When one shot is completed, the Truffaut character labels it ‘‘Fine, perfect,’’ and someone asks him what would be done next. ‘‘We do it again,” he replies, providing a beautifully compact summation of the film’s schizoid emotional outlook.
Truffaut is actually much closer to the romantic pragmatism of some of Vincente Minnelli’s showbiz movies (The Band Wagon, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Two Weeks in Another Town), but the modesty and humor of this film are uniquely his. Not the least of its charms is that it so engagingly undercuts the pretensions of an era which seems to take its filmmakers very seriously or not at all. Also among the film’s pleasures are Jean-Pierre Léaud’s admirable self-parody and the contributions of a feisty script girl played by Nathalie Baye. (It is perhaps no coincidence that partial credit for Day for Night‘s screenplay is given to Suzanne Schiffman who, if memory serves, has script girl credits on other Truffaut films.) The moment I liked best comes when the Bisset character’s performance is “directed” by an offscreen event which moves her in just the way that Ferrand/Truffaut had been looking for. Little fillips like these recur as Truffaut playfully juggles illusion and reality, but for me the most striking thing of all is that this pleasantly nuanced foreign film is the best entertainment film of the year [1973]. When you look up and find two “art film” guys like Truffaut and Claude Chabrol as the current (and sole surviving?) masters of what’s left of the traditional movie, you begin to understand how much times have changed.
Day for Night is an absolutely ingratiating film that mixes spicy comedy with astute observations on human nature. It exudes all the enchantment, zaniness, and transitory pleasures that are the essence of the movie-making business. Truffaut shares a little secret with us: wonder is at the heart of this entire enterprise.
Set in Nice's Victorine Studios, where it was filmed, Day for Night is a touching, funny and accurate account of the travails (accidents, disputes, affairs, imbroglios, death) involved in the making of an all-star international picture called Je vous présente Paméla. It is a Pirandellian affair, an elegiac celebration of a dying kind of cinema, a meditation on the connection between film and life by Truffaut, who plays Ferrand, the film's constantly troubled yet dedicated director, a man much like himself. Ferrand compares the process of film-making to "a stagecoach journey into the far west. At the start you hope for a beautiful trip. But shortly you wonder if you will make it at all."
First seen in 1973, this is Truffaut's valentine to cinema, whose technical processes he clearly delighted in as much as its problems. Most films about film-making tend to be ironic, or baleful, but not this one: Day for Night is watchful yet sweet-tempered, and even rather innocent-minded. Truffaut himself plays the director of a movie called "Meet Pamela", and creates a happy atmosphere on set in Nice – he's no control-freak or prankster (like his idol Hitchcock) but merely a trouble-shooter and a cajoler of talent. "Cinema is king!" he cries at one stage, and his cast and crew respond to his benign instruction like a party of eager schoolchildren – his romantic fool of a leading man (Jean-Pierre Léaud), his kindly, fragile lead actress (Jacqueline Bisset, green-eyed, graceful, never lovelier), his pert young assistant (Nathalie Baye). There's a funny cameo by a recalcitrant feline ("Find me a cat who can act") and a curious, unrevealing one by the writer Graham Greene as a financial backer. If there's a fault, you could cite a lack of real drama; despite an on-set fling and an off-stage death, the emotional temperature never rises above an amiable mildness. But Truffaut's intense affection for his art and his people still touches, and makes you mourn for a talent that departed – aged 52 – much too early.
It’s a hilarious and informative movie, and in the pantheon of films about filmmaking, it strikes a neat balance between the operatic neuroses of ‘8 1/2’ and the warm, pastel-hued nostalgia of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. Also of interest – and a devious nod back to his ’60s heyday – is the manner in which Truffaut captures these behind-the-scenes shenanigans, employing gliding crane shots and flashes of abrupt editing to make us fully aware of the majestically artificial way the world is depicted by filmmakers.
François Truffaut’s 1973 film shows us the reverse side of cinema’s tapestry: the audience sees the intricately woven figures and pleasing shapes, but behind there are the ragged knots, rough-looking jumbles, and loose threads. This is the farcical and chaotic story of a film being made.
The greatest film ever made about filmmaking? Some might lean toward “Singin’ in the Rain.” Others might see your “Contempt” and raise you “8 1/2.” But for some (comme moi), the answer will always be “Day for Night,” François Truffaut’s Oscar-winning 1973 comedy about a film crew that comes together for a seven-week shoot in the south of France.
On both sides of the camera, Truffaut generates a warmth that makes you respond in kind to the film and the film within it. The “niceness” of the lovely Miss Bisset, the brilliant glittering wit of Ms. Cortese’s portrait of a lady actress, the charm of Aumont’s portrayal of the pro and the adolescent obnoxiousness that Léaud generates are supplemented by marvelous bits and pieces and personalities of movie-making that beat any course on the campus books at the moment. Truffaut, his co-authors, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean-Louis Ricahard and everyone else involved have, in fact, provided us with a festival of a film in one sitting.
None but the French could succeed so well to turn incredibly daring problems into most spontaneous, effortless entertainment. Francois Truffaut, the director, is the central actor in the film, which is about the making of a film. It’s a subject which probably every director would like to try; Fellini, Anderson, are among those who have, but without the marvelously sophisticated simplicity with which Truffaut carries it off. He allows himself some commentary, and a few glimpses of strange private nightmares. Otherwise, much of it is like a cool economical documentary. Yet gradually, like on an ocean cruise, the whole outfit, crew, and actors become real people and their personal lives begin to surface. Witty, ironic, tragic, and wonderfully natural, this is a snatch of unmistakably true experience from a master who knows the film world in depth.