Day for Night

Francois Truffaut won only one Oscar--it was for the 1973 Best Foreign Language film, and the winner was Day for Night. He was also nominated for Best Director and Writer for the film. Aside from The 400 Blows, it is Truffaut's most acclaimed film.

By this time, it was clear that Truffaut was unabashedly a sentimentalist, and a lover of Hollywood cinema. The French title of the film is La Nuit Americain, or The American Night, which is a term for shooting a night scene during the day (the American phrase for this is, natch, day for night). By using the word American in his title, Truffaut clearly, even at the height of his game, was still acknowledging the influence of American movies on his work.

Day for Night is the story of a film being made, and it plays like an exciting adventure. Truffaut himself plays the director, who is dogged but not mercurial--there's a kind of business problem-solving aspect to him. He also, interestingly, is deaf, and wears a hearing aid on his sleeve.

The plot covers all the vicissitudes of making a movie, from insurance problems to temperamental stars to an actress who is pregnant to a cat not going for a saucer of milk to the death of an actor. Some of them are quite funny, especially embodied by Valentina Cortese as an aging star who hits the sauce a little too hard and can't remember her lines (Cortese was nominated for an Oscar, and the winner, Ingrid Bergman, said that she should have won).

Several subplots run through the film. Jacqueline Bisset is the English superstar who has just come off a nervous breakdown. Jean-Pierre Leaud is a love-struck actor who gets dumped by a script girl, and then locks himself in his room. He comes out, wearing just a nightshirt, and asks for money for a whore.

But the overall theme of the film is the siren call of cinema to those involved. Nathalie Baye, who plays Truffaut's assistant, can't believe that a person would quit a movie for a man: "I would drop a guy for a film," she says, "but never a film for a guy."  Truffaut, luring Leaud back to work, tells him: "Go back to your room, re-read the script, learn your lines, then try to sleep. Tomorrow we work. That's what matters. Don't be a fool. You're a very good actor. No one's private life runs smoothly. That only happens in the movies. No traffic jams, no dead periods. Movies go along like trains in the night. And people like you and me are only happy in our work."

Truffaut also seems to be interested in showing the sausage-making of film. We see how artificial snow is made, how a simple window dressing can stand in for an entire apartment, and how large crowd scenes are handled. Here, film is magic, but it's also nuts and bolts and work.

The film is dedicated to Dorothy and Lillian Gish, and Truffaut pays homage to the silent era with his treatment of Bisset. She's a perfectly capable actress, but Truffaut can't stop glorying in her face. And it's a great face.

There have been many films about the making of movies--screenwriters write about what they know, after all--and Day for Night may be the best one ever made.