Cinema: A Sly, Loving Tribute to Film Making

DAY FOR NIGHT

Directed by FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

Screenplay by FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, JEAN-LOUIS RICHARD and SUZANNE SCHIFFMAN

A long, finely choreographed street scene: clusters of people move easily along or hurry out of a Metro entrance. We see, then lose, a young man. A red sports car drives by; a mother wheels a carriage along the sidewalk; a man walks casually until he meets the young man, who has slipped back into the frame. The two stare at each other in questioning, quiet hostility for a moment. Then the boy slaps the man across the face.

"Cut!" calls a voice. The film goes on, but suddenly the director appears on the screen, giving his actors a critique of the take. The red sports car moved out of the shot too soon. There was not enough background action. Some of the extras did not come out of the Metro entrance fast enough.

We are momentarily disoriented, startled, a little frustrated. It is as if a magician performed a beautiful trick, then pulled back the curtains to show how he did it. This new movie of Truffaut's is just such a revelation, a sly and loving tribute to the elaborate and inspiring chaos of film making—and Truffaut's funniest, shrewdest, most relaxed work in some time.

Day for Night (the title is film maker's argot for photographing scenes in daylight to make them look like night) recounts the frustrations, compensations and intramural emotional crises of a crew on location in Nice to shoot a movie called Meet Pamela. "Shooting a film is like taking a stagecoach ride in the Old West," says the director (deftly played by Truffaut himself). "First you hope to have a nice trip. Then you just hope to reach your destination."

The cast and crew abound in the sort of personalities that would be recognizable in any film company. There is the eager, flustered young leading man (Jean-Pierre Léaud); the older leading man with the assurance of experience (Jean-Pierre Aumont); and the older leading woman who drinks too much and muddles her scenes (Valentina Cortèse). There is the young leading woman, an American who has just recovered from a nervous breakdown and is making her first film in over a year (Jacqueline Bisset); the film groupie who starts out as a script girl and ends up running off with the stunt man (Dani). Also present are the director's dedicated, sensible assistant (Nathalie Baye), who muses: "I would give up a guy for a film—but I would never give up a film for a guy"; a zany special effects man (Bernard Menez); a forever wide-eyed makeup girl (Nike Arrighi); an anxious producer (Jean Champion); and a production manager (Gaston Joly) with a suspicious wife (Zénaide Rossi). Under normal circumstances, such a group could be counted on to cordially despise one another. But on location they create the kind of exuberant turmoil from which movies—just barely—get made.