Day For Night

Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine) (1973)

Runtime: 116 minutes

Directed by: Francois Truffaut

Starring: Truffaut, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Nathalie Baye

From: Several French and Italian companies

Why did I have this sitting on my DVR for three months? I finally was inspired to give it a shot last night, partially due to needing a pick me up; all I'll say about what happened in the United States yesterday is that a lot of people are quite upset at what happened. Anyhow, I've enjoyed the three other Truffaut pictures I've seen-admittedly they were his most popular (The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player & Jules and Jim) but I still feel like a fool as it should have been watched years earlier by myself, nevermind as soon as I recorded Day for Night in March.

This may very well be the best movie about the making of a movie ever made. Truffaut stars as a director who is in Nice making what probably will be a bad melodrama (Meet Pamela) concerning a newly married couple where the bride and the father of the groom fall in love. Admittedly I've never been on a motion picture set and will presume that with all the dozens of people involved and a tight schedule, that most if not all are rather chaotic, a stressful experience featuring harried people, compromises, tempers flaring up, and some diva behavior.

Well, I will presume the filming of a film within a film was worse than typical. A faded star who's lost confidence in herself and likes hitting the bottle, an older male lead worried about his private life (and while not explicitly stated, it certainly appeared as if he was a closeted homosexual), a young actress returning to the screen after disaster in her life, romances beginning and ending on set, drama between some of the people on set, diva behavior-not just from the women-and more which I won't reveal... yet the director never lost his cool or the hope that Meet Pamela will be completed. The audience is likely to also have the same desire for this calamitous production to avoid further incident.

As someone who's never been on set before, it was bewitching seeing how the sausage was made, so to speak. Even what appeared to be a “simple” melodrama where most of the scenes appeared to be conversations still had a lot going on. The track that a camera is mounted on for when it needed to move (this was before the Steadicam was a thing), the sets, all the people involved in setting up a scene, the prep work, a stuntman being used for a key moment, and I know some will mark out for seeing the Panavision cameras of the time. Plus, it does note various people behind the camera that don't always receive their just due: the propmen, the camera operators, the makeup lady, etc.

Day for Night definitely taught me that the script supervisor (back then known as the script girl) did a LOT on set. This included carrying around the script for the actors & director, timing each scene, knowing where the main actors are, being someone that any actor can give gossip to, helping the director rewrite dialogue or entire scenes, wrangling stars, and at least in this case, doing something absurd to help calm a neurotic star and fixing another department's dumb mistake. Wikipedia has a full breakdown of all that this person does but as it also involves continuity, camera set-up, production reports and editor's notes... it sounds extremely difficult due to all the work involved so such people definitely deserve more credit. Meet Pamela would have been a far worse mess if it wasn't for script supervisor Joelle, so props to her.

Anyhow, this was a movie I loved even more than what I was expecting from all the high praise I've seen on Letterboxd and elsewhere. What a magical journey it was, experienced with a collection of wacky characters who tried to persevere despite all that went wrong and all their human emotions.