`Day for Night” — which Francois Truffaut co-wrote, starred in and directed in 1973 at the peak of his powers — offers the fullest and most sympathetic picture any film has given us of the process of making a movie. “Singin’ in the Rain” or “8 1/2” may be greater works, but this is the movie that best shows us the day-to-day routine, the magic and mechanics of filmmaking.
Truffaut was a passionate lover of cinema, and here he records his passion, even casting himself as Ferrand, workmanlike director of a French romantic melodrama called “Meet Pamela.” Shot on location in Nice, “Meet Pamela,” despite its idyllic setting, is beset by problems: drunkenness and infidelity among the leading players, walkouts among the crew, costume and prop foulups, money shortages and a final disaster that almost shuts down the movie.
All this is narrated by Truffaut’s Ferrand, an unflappable cineaste who never loses his temper or equanimity, but whose doubts and fears emerge when he tosses in his sleep at night, in the throes of a recurrent nightmare about his childhood (and a theater showing “Citizen Kane”). Each day, in the Nice sunlight, he faces some new difficulty, usually solved by himself or his crew — most often his resourceful assistant director Joelle (Nathalie Baye). Each day he confronts the fears of his veteran producer Bertrand (Jean Champion), or the emotional fragility of his beautiful star Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) — or any of a host of smaller problems.
In “Day for Night,” we become intimately aware of the entire filmmaking process, from scripting to shooting, editing and observing the rushes. Such is Truffaut’s affection, that we root for “Meet Pamela,” the film within a film, despite its obvious cliches. Shot in a style that sometimes suggests Truffaut’s own “Jules and Jim” and “Two English Girls,” “Meet Pamela” is the forced dark romantic melodrama of a young bride, played by Julie Baker (Bisset), who leaves her immature young husband, played by Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud), for his middle-aged charmer of a father, played by Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), before the eyes of her bubbly mother-in-law, played by Severine (Valentina Cortese).
“Meet Pamela” ends with a death and funeral rite, stemming from a confrontation we see in the first scene of “Day for Night”: a long and complex tracking shot, which follows Alphonse as he emerges from a subway, crosses a busy square carrying a revolver, marches up to his philandering father and slaps him. Reality and fate immediately intervene. That opening shot, which we first take for the beginning of “Day for Night,” is interrupted by director Ferrand and repeated again and again. Later, we learn that all these takes were ruined in the lab and that the retake must be delayed until the end of the shoot. Then, much altered, it becomes our very last glimpse of “Meet Pamela.”
In between the first big city square scene and its retake, Truffaut shows us a little world that’s diverse, colorful, evanescent. Alphonse has engineered the hiring of his girlfriend Liliane (Dani) as a script girl, but her promiscuity turns him into a nervous wreck. Julie, recently recovered from a breakdown, longs for her real-life absent new husband, psychologist Michael (David Markham). Ingenue Stacey (Alexandra Stewart) is noticeably pregnant. Co-star Severine, a prima donna who had a long-ago Hollywood fling with Alexandre, drinks so heavily she has trouble with her lines. (In one of “Day for Night’s” great scenes, Severine repeatedly messes up a simple exit, driving the crew and herself to near distraction.) And Alexandre has a secret of his own: a late-arriving lover who surprises everyone.
Midway through the shoot, Joelle makes a joking allusion to Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece (and Truffaut’s favorite film), “The Rules of the Game.” Anyone familiar with “Rules” — and its dazzling ensemble portrait of masters and servants at a country chateau — will have noticed already many similarities to “Day for Night.” The “Meet Pamela” shoot suggests the weekend shooting party in “Rules”; the cast and crew roughly correspond to the masters and servants.
How close is Ferrand to Truffaut? He is no on-set womanizer (as Truffaut was reputed to be). But he certainly suggests his creator, never more so than when Ferrand opens up a mail parcel of books, out of which tumble monographs on Truffaut’s own favorite auteurs: Renoir, Hawks, Hitchcock, Bergman, John Ford and even his old “Cahiers du Cinema” colleague Jean-Luc Godard. Yet Truffaut is not “playing himself,” any more than is Leaud. Or Bisset — who sometimes suggests another Truffaut actress, Julie Christie (“Fahrenheit 451”). “Day for Night” mixes fact and fancy, truth and fiction, making us always aware of the sheer hard work needed in making and sustaining illusions.
And the esprit de corps needed, as well. When Truffaut is critical of a character, like flirty Liliane, who runs away with a British stunt man, it’s because she abandons her job and hurts the film. (“I’d ditch a guy for a film,” one loyalist comments, “but never a film for a guy.”) When Truffaut loves a character, it is someone like Joelle, or the omnipresent seraphic makeup girl Odile (Nike Arrighi) — or Julie, endangering herself to save the movie.
“Day for Night” is the Hollywood term for the process by which night scenes are shot through filters in daytime (called “La Nuit Americain” in France). And the film itself is an insider’s valentine to the cinema, from a devoted admirer whose heart remains ardent even though his eyes are hardly blind to his loved one’s flaws.
“Day for Night,” which is showing at Facets in a new 35 mm print, is full of what Truffaut the film critic called “privileged moments.” Toward the end of the film, two British insurance agents appear, one played by novelist-screenwriter Graham Greene — who had been cast locally, without Truffaut’s knowledge. And the four actors who play the “Meet Pamela” leads receive one of their profession’s most glorious tributes. Even when they madden us, as Alphonse and Severine frequently do, all four become angels in the camera’s eye — none more so than Bisset, whose beauty in this film seems really sublime.
Despite its 1973 success, “Day for Night” was attacked by the day’s movie ideologues as too politically unengaged. They missed the point. True, there are no monologues about Palestine and revolution in “Day for Night,” as there were in Godard’s late ’60s and ’70s films. Yet, along with “The 400 Blows,” “Day for Night” is Truffaut’s most political film. It is his portrait of an ideal (if hardly utopian) society — responsive to one human’s artistic vision yet interacting marvelously on its own. The beauty and solace of filmmaking, Truffaut suggests, resides (as in the chateau world of “The Rules of the Game”) with the community — a community that delights and inspires us, even as it tears itself apart. This mixed but loving vision of the movies charmed audiences in 1973. Today, if anything, it charms (and also saddens) us more.
”DAY FOR NIGHT” (”LA NUIT AMERICAIN”)
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Directed by Francois Truffaut; written by Jean-Louis Richard, Suzanne Schiffman, Truffaut; photographed by Pierre-William Glenn; edited by Martine Barraque, Yann Dedet; production designed by Damien Lanfranchi; music by Georges Delerue; produced by Marcel Bebert. French, with English subtitles. A Warner Bros. release; opens Friday at Facets Multimedia. Running time: 1:55. No MPAA rating. Adult. Language, sensuality, nudity.
THE CAST
Ferrand ……………… Francois Truffaut
Julie ……………….. Jacqueline Bisset
Alphonse …………….. Jean-Pierre Leaud
Alexandre ……………. Jean-Pierre Aumont
Severine …………….. Valentina Cortese
Bertrand …………….. Jean Champion
Liliane ……………… Dani
Joelle ………………. Nathalie Baye
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