Director Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) is regarded as one of the greatest French directors. His most famous film is his first feature, The 400 Blows (1959). To American audiences, he is probably most familiar as an actor, in a supporting role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
One of his most successful films in America was the La Nuit Americaine, which is French for "The American Night". The title refers to a camera filtering process in which scenes shot during the daylight can appear to have been filmed at night. In the States, the film is known as Day for Night.
It is a comedy about the travails of filmmaking. Truffaut is first billed as Ferrand, a director whose current project is "Meet Pamela". It is an unpromising romance drama, starring Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) as the newlywed wife of Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who leaves him for his own father, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont).
Ferrand has only seven weeks to shoot the film, but is beset by production problems. The film lab destroys an expensive crowd scene; an alcoholic actress (Valentina Cortese) keeps forgetting her lines; Alphonse refuses to leave his room after a sudden breakup with the script girl (Dani); Julie has a crisis in her marriage with a much older doctor (David Markham); a skittish kitten refuses to act.
Day for Night is semi-biographical, in that Truffaut had to deal with similar surprises during the production of his earlier films. The tragic car crash killing one of the stars of "Meet Pamela" may be based on the 1967 accident that took the life of Francoise Dorleac. She was the sister of Catherine Deneuve, and working under director Jacques Remy for his film The Young Girls of Rochefort at the time of her death.
Day for Night does have a moment of surrealism. Ferrand has a recurring black and white dream, starring a boy with a cane who cleverly steals production stills from Citizen Kane (1941). Feel free to speculate on any implied symbolic meaning.
The print of the film that I saw was dubbed in English. The sound was very good, but the dubbing was still very obvious. Of course, the film itself is not to be blamed for its maltreatment at the hands of American distributors. Still, the original French language version with English subtitles is much preferred.
Perhaps not every actor or crew member sleeps with another during the course of a film's production. Perhaps the director has idiosyncrasies of his or her own, something not apparent in the smoothly professional role of Ferrand. But while its comedy can be exaggerated, Day for Night is often very entertaining. And sometimes moving as well: one can feel sorry for Julie when her sacrifice for the sake of the film backfires on her.
Truffaut and Leaud worked together on seven films, including the classic The 400 Blows.
Noted author Graham Greene and the film's producer, Marcel Berbert, have cameos as insurance agents.
Day for Night received four Academy Awards nominations, an unusual occurrence for a foreign language film. Truffaut was nominated for Best Director, and for Best Original Screenplay (along with Jean-Louis Richard and Suzanne Schiffman). Cortese was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Day for Night won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (71/100)
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