Day For Night
THERE ARE SOME films that express the ecstasy in filmmaking (Singin’ In The Rain). There are others that capture the agony (8 ½). But only Day For Night (La Nuit Américaine) perfectly encapsulates both. Titled after the process of shooting night-time scenes during the day, François Truffaut’s billet-doux to movies — making them, watching them, dreaming about them — is the Valentine the art form deserves. Writing to critic Jean-louis Bory, Truffaut declared, “I gathered up all of myself and reconciled it into La Nuit Américaine, which is quite simply about my reason for living.” The result is heartfelt, freewheeling and nimble. It simultaneously pulls back the curtain on the artifice of filmmaking but somehow retains the magic and glamour. If you know nothing about how movies come to be, Day For Night has it all.
Shot at Victorine Studios near Nice at the same time as Herbert Ross’ The Last Of Sheila, Day For Night follows the making of melodramatic pot-boiler ‘Meet Pamela’ from the first day of shooting to the last. The highconcept plot for the film-within-a-film — a young Englishwoman marries a similar-aged French man, then falls for her father-in-law — was inspired by a newspaper cutting that Truffaut had saved since the early ’60s. It’s a ‘making of’ story filled with romantic dalliances, egos run rampant, pragmatic worries (the insurance rep is played by Graham Greene, a huge Truffaut fan, although the director was never told it was the novelist in the cameo role and was furious to have missed the chance for a chat), a death, a car crash and reshoots. Its disasters make Apocalypse Now look like a Tiktok video.
Typically, Truffaut has a generous view of the production’s loveable eccentrics: the two oldschool stars, Alexandre (Jean-pierre Aumont) and Séverine (Valentina Cortese) reunited after an affair long ago; young actor Alphonse (Truffaut muse Jean-pierre Léaud), who is besotted with intern Liliane (French pop star Dani) and keeps asking, “Are women magical?” (“No, but their legs are,” replies a grip); and Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset), an insecure English actress reputedly based on Truffaut’s
experiences working with Julie Christie on Fahrenheit 451. It’s not just the above-the-line people Truffaut cares about. The film gives equal weight to script supervisor Joelle (after seeing the film, Billy Wilder thought debutante actor Nathalie Baye was an actual script supervisor), make-up artist Odile (Nike Arrighi) and bumbling prop master Bernard (Bernard Ménez). It’s such a warmly evinced, intimate family, it makes you instantly jealous you’ve never been part of a film crew.
This band apart is led by director Ferrand, played by Truffaut himself. “A director is someone who’s asked questions about everything,” reflects Ferrand, who wears a hearing aid as a barrier to the crew (it’s an in-joke as Truffaut had ear damage from gunfire during army training). The real réalisateur sneaks in charming moments filleted from his own filmmaking career: the crew having a nightmare trying to shoot a cat investigating a breakfast tray refers directly to Soft Skin; during a period party scene, a candle that illuminates the actress’ face via a hidden light bulb was a trick devised by DP Néstor Almendros for The Wild Child.
It is also littered with more personal allusions, some not so flattering. Ferrand stealing a conversation he has with a distressed Julie and putting it directly in ‘Meet Pamela’ is a trait that alienated Truffaut from his parents following The 400 Blows. The recurring dream of Ferrand as a child stealing lobby stills of Citizen Kane from a locked-up cinema is ripped from Truffaut’s own Paris upbringing as a cine-literate juvenile delinquent. Still, there is one important way in which the fake director and real director diverge: Truffaut has never made a film as bad as ‘Meet Pamela’ looks. He couldn’t if he tried.
Love of cinema courses through Day For Night from frame one. It’s dedicated to silent film legends Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Ferrand receives a package of books about (Truffaut’s heroes) Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini and Carl Theodor Dreyer that feels like product placement for the BFI bookshop. But, beyond blatant referencing, there are lovely moments of cinematic lore, such as when the perpetually pissed Séverine can’t remember her lines so she just spouts numbers “like with Federico”, a call back to Cortese’s days dubbing with Fellini on Juliet Of The Spirits. If, for whatever reason, you are feeling weary about cinema, Day For Night will refresh you.
From the opening fake-out to the almost mockumentary feel (all the lead actors tell the BTS documentary crew that ‘Meet Pamela’ is really about them), it’s a film that has formed a touchstone for any backstage movie ever since, pilfered by diverse works from The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ video (the clapperboard reads “Le League Humaine” in homage) to Wes Anderson’s American Express ad where he plays a harassed director to the strains of Georges Delerue’s triumphant theme.
But perhaps the film’s biggest legacy lies in its effect on one of the key relationships in Truffaut’s life: with director Jean-luc Godard. While critics, audiences and the industry embraced Day For Night (it won the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and Best Film and Direction at the BAFTAS), Godard stormed out halfway through a screening and sent Truffaut a four-page rant branding him a liar: “One wonders why the director is the only one who doesn’t fuck in Day For Night” (with typical Godard cheek, he asked Truffaut for money to mount a Marxist riposte to the film). Truffaut hit back with a 20-page screed calling him a phoney, a narcissist and, most famously
“a piece of shit on a pedestal”. The pair never really spoke again.
It’s hard to imagine falling out over something so beguiling. In 1980 Truffaut made a similar film, The Last Metro, about theatre folk, but it didn’t quite reach the same heights. Perhaps the difference lies in the simple and evident truth spoken by Ferrand that governed both Day For Night and Truffaut’s heart: “Cinema is king!”
DAY FOR NIGHT IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND BLU-RAY