“THE MOVIE FOR MOVIE LOVERS”

By Raymond Benson

François Truffaut had an all too short but certainly brilliant career as a filmmaker. He began in the world of film criticism in France, but in the late 1950s he decided to make movies himself. Truffaut quickly shot to the forefront of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 60s, alongside the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and others. By the time the 70s rolled around, Truffaut was a national treasure in France and a mainstay in art house cinemas in the U.S. and Britain.

His 1973 masterpiece, Day for Night (in France La Nuit Américaine, or “American Night”), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of that year, the only time Truffaut picked up an Academy Award. Due to odd eligibility rules, the picture could be nominated for other categories the following year. For 1974, Truffaut was nominated for Best Director, the script by Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, and Jean-Louis Richard was up for Best Original Screenplay, and Valentina Cortese was nominated for Supporting Actress. Thus, Day for Night is perhaps one of the auteur’s best known works outside of France.

The title refers to a technique used in Hollywood pictures to create night scenes shot during the day by using a special filter. In France “day for night” was also known as “American night,” because it was an inexpensive and less complicated method to achieve the effect.

The title is entirely appropriate because the movie is about making a movie. Truffaut plays a director named Ferrand (the filmmaker often acted in his own pictures; most non-French audiences will remember his major role in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The film he is making is a trite melodrama about an older man falling in love with his soon-to-be daughter-in-law—which is a plot that might very well have been in a real Truffaut movie. In fact, several of the talking heads in the disc’s supplements suggest that Truffaut was slyly making fun of his own 1964 melodrama, The Soft Skin (reviewed here), which at the time of its release was a financial and critical disappointment for the filmmaker.

Bisset and Truffaut

The “plot,” as it were, of Day for Night is nothing more than a freeform documentation of the movie’s shoot, particularly focusing on the actors and crew and the on-screen and off-screen relationships they have while on location—who’s falling in love, who’s breaking up, who’s sleeping with or cheating on whom, and so on. In fact, mimicking the love triangle that’s in the film-within-the-film, two of the lead actors, Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud) have an affair, jeopardizing the actress’ marriage, especially when Alphonse becomes enraged with jealousy when Julie decides to reconcile with her husband when the man visits the set. There are other dalliances among crew members... at one point a wife visiting her henpecked production manager husband shouts at the entire production staff, “What is this movie business? Where everyone sleeps with everyone! Everyone lies! Do you think it's normal? Your movie world...I think it stinks. I despise it!”

Yes, it’s a romantic comedy, and there are quite a few laughs and whimsical moments. Truffaut was often guilty of injecting sentimentality into his films, and it’s here in abundance. This is not a bad thing, for the director did this thing well. Day for Night is indeed very light, its buoyancy aided by Georges Delerue’s sparkling score. It’s a quintessential Truffaut picture in that it hits his various auteur thematic signatures—love affairs, infidelity, reconciliation, pathos, and even cinema history. In fact, the picture is in itself an homage to the art of making motion pictures. A key recurring sequence is when Ferrand has fitful dreams at night, picturing himself as a young boy desperate to steal lobby cards and press photos from the local cinema. As the American movie posters claimed in the tag line, “it’s a movie for people who love movies.”

The cast is sensational. Besides Truffaut, Bisset, and Leaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont plays the older screen idol who is nearing retirement, Valentina Cortese is an Italian screen idol whose major earlier work was “with Fellini” (and this is true for Cortese herself!). Other Truffaut “regulars” such as Dani, Alexandra Stewart, and Nathalie Baye, make appearances.

The picture was shot at the legendary Victorine Studios in Nice, France (now called Riviera Studios), the site where many noted films were made, such as To Catch a Thief, Children of Paradise, Lola Montes, Mon Oncle, And God Created Woman, and more. These photos depict what the grounds looked like in 2000, when I visited the location while researching my James Bond novel, Never Dream of Dying (the studios were used as a model for a setting in the book). While I walked around the grounds, I mostly thought of Day for Night, for Truffaut’s movie had stayed with me for decades since I first saw it on its initial release.

Photos taken by Raymond Benson at the filming location in 2000.(Photos copyright Raymond Benson. All rights reserved.) 

The Criterion Collection presents a gorgeous new restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Pierre-William Glenn, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Most of the supplements that appeared on the Warner Brothers DVD of 2001 have been ported over, such as vintage “making of” documentaries; interviews with Truffaut, Bisset, and several other cast and crew members; a documentary on the film featuring film scholar Annette Insdorf; and vintage news clips such as Truffaut being interviewed at Cannes. New supplements include a fascinating video essay by the extraordinary filmmaker :: kogonada; new interviews with DOP Glenn and assistant editor Martine Barraqué; and a new engrossing interview with film scholar Dudley Andrew about the rift that occurred between Truffaut and Godard after the release of the film. An essay by critic David Cairns adorns the booklet.

Day for Night is easily one of François Truffaut’s best films. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to the movie lover inside you to pick up this one.

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