“Day for Night” (1973)

Day for Night

Grade: A

The famous French critic-turned-director François Truffaut delivers a passionate love-letter to the artform that has given his life purpose — Day for Night is a tender movie about making movies, one that gives equal shine to the directors and the script girls, with no stone unturned and no minutiae unexamined. A few more notes on Day for Night:

Directing:

Day for Night chronicles the production of a fictional film (Meet Pamela, a hokey melodrama) from first day to last. As if that wasn’t meta enough, Truffaut himself stars as the fictional film’s director. In between, he examines the daily struggles and triumphs that everyone on set undergoes, capturing it all with a warm and comforting cinéma verité style, while also paying homage to his heroes and contemporaries (e.g., Robert Bresson, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, etc.). He perfectly conveys his love for filmmaking and passes it on to us, even as we see how maddening the process truly is.

Acting:

Every character is realistic — director, producer, actors, script girls, stuntmen, camera operators, make-up artists, etc. The performances are so engrossing that we forget that, at least in Day for Night, they are all actors playing roles.

Writing:

Nobody knows films as well as Truffaut, which is why Day for Night so often feels like a Meet Pamela behind-the-scenes documentary. The attention to detail is astounding. You might lose your mind trying to think of how Truffaut staged and scripted each scene, and how all the trivialities seen onscreen are also happening simultaneously during the production of Day for Night itself. The film is extremely clever without ever being pretentious, which is why it can be rewatched endlessly.

Music:

The soundtrack by Georges Delerue also doubles as the soundtrack for Meet Pamela, and the opening credits — in which the orchestral score is played back at different volumes and frequencies — is our first glimpse at Truffaut’s clever postmodern sensibilities. Even though the music is always diegetic, it still tugs at our emotions, which further blurs the lines between fiction and metafiction.

Ending (SPOILERS):

Perhaps the only non-realistic dramatic element is the fact that one of the actors dies as the production draws to a close. Either way, Truffaut’s fictional film crew soldiers on and shoots the final scene with a body double (after discussing their legal obligations with the insurance company). There’s never a sense of tragedy because, as Day for Night would have us believe, love is more important than life (love of cinema, that is). The film has a perfectly unassuming ending: the production has wrapped, everyone goes their separate ways and maybe they’ll meet again some sunny day on another production.

“Cinema is king.” – Ferrand

Why Day for Night gets an A:

There has never been a more true-to-life film about filmmaking than Day for Night, which gives viewers a palpable sense of the chaos, confusion and love that goes into each cinematic production. If it isn’t Truffaut’s best, it’s certainly his most rewatchable.

Accolades:

Colin’s Review Best Films of the 1970s

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