Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Day for Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La nuit américaine

    François Truffaut (1973)

    To describe Day for Night as easy watching is no more a term of praise than to describe music as easy listening.  The film is amazingly fluent but its shallowness is soon tedious:  the only bit I really enjoyed was a sequence that involved the shooting of a scene featuring cats.  No surprises there and the sequence itself was just as predictable (multiple takes required).  Day for Night is about the making of a film, called ‘Meet Pamela’.  The director of this film within a film is called Ferrand and he’s played by François Truffaut.  While ‘Meet Pamela’ seems much punier than any Truffaut film I’ve (so far) seen, we’re given no other reason to think that Ferrand is significantly different from Truffaut or that the philosophy of film-making which Ferrand expounds isn’t Truffaut’s own.   (‘Meet Pamela’ is a family romantic melodrama:  a young man introduces his fiancée to his parents; the young woman and her prospective father-in-law then fall in love.  The storyline and dialogue are as tame as for ‘Girls and Suitcases’, the pallid film within Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces.)   Day for Night is seen as Truffaut’s love letter to cinema.  Many people who have a deep affection for Truffaut seem to deduce that this piece of cinephilia must have depth too.

    Hardly any of the characters in Day for Night is any different from what you’d expect from clichéd ideas of film people.  There’s the flamboyantly theatrical has-been with an alcohol problem.  There are other actors as insecure as they’re egotistical and/or promiscuous.  There’s the writer-director inventing new scenes on the hoof and resorting to using what’s actually happening to members of his cast and crew in order to do so.  Ferrand also has to compromise when it comes to shooting the end of the film as one of the leads has died in a car crash (a relatively strong moment only because it comes out of the blue and a ‘real’ death has seemed to be beyond the scope of Day for Night).   The magic of screen illusion is stressed repeatedly – fake snow, a stuntman in women’s clothes, a trompe l’oeil set construction, and so on.  The film’s title refers to a technique of shooting a night-time scene in daylight.   There’s nothing objectionable about any of this but nothing remarkable either.  The most meaningful things in the picture seem meant to be Ferrand’s aperçus about cinema – on the level of ‘For people like us, true happiness is to be found only in movies’.  This race-apart insight feels like a (weak) repetition of one of the themes of Les enfants du paradis – which immediately prompts the question:  are film fanatics that different from their theatre counterparts?   Ferrand speaks these words to Alphonse, the male lead in ‘Meet Pamela’, played by Truffaut’s persisting alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud.   (Truffaut famously loved women, off screen and on, and made a film called The Man Who Loved Women. He’s bestowed this characteristic on the Léaud character in Day for Night.  Alphonse’s absolute love of women moves him to extreme, ridiculous behaviour.)  A parcel of books arrives for Ferrand and they’re all film books – about Bergman, Bresson, Buñuel, Hitchcock et al.  Ferrand has a dream in which he’s a boy twiddling a Chaplin cane and stealing stills from outside a cinema showing Citizen Kane.  If he thinks he’s pinching from Welles, why is Ferrand making crap like ‘Meet Pamela’?    

    I’m sure there are loads of movie references that I missed.  One that I picked up was a remark that the British actress playing Pamela had recently appeared in ‘that film with the car chase’:  Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the actress, was in Bullitt (1968).  This reassured me that, if I was losing out on the other in-jokes, I wasn’t missing much.  The humour in Day for Night is pretty hopeless.  The production designer’s wife (Zénaïde Rossi) sits throughout the shoot scolding Ferrand and his crew for what they’re doing, and knitting.  Is there any significance in that detail?   Part of you thinks this must be sportive symbolism:  the wife is a latterday tricoteuse, wanting to see ‘Meet Pamela’s’ potential delights bite the dust like severed heads.  Or perhaps she knits just because that’s such a dull thing to be doing – she’s following a prescribed pattern while the abundantly creative people around her are making a movie.  This character’s name is Madame Lajoie, which probably gives some idea of the satirical level Truffaut has in mind.  The famous sequence in which Séverine, the dipso star-in-decline, keeps messing up a scene by opening the wrong door certainly is the comic highlight of Day for Night but that isn’t saying much.

    Although Valentina Cortese plays that door-opening routine with great aplomb, her much-admired portrait of Séverine doesn’t otherwise do that much for me.  And while there are agreeable performances from, among others, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Nathalie Baye and Léaud, the exchanges between Jacqueline Bisset and David Markham, as her much older husband, are terribly wooden.   The most striking appearance is from Graham Greene in a one-minute cameo (see Pauline Kael’s review in Reeling for explanation).  I think Truffaut owes as much to Georges Delerue as to any of the cast.  The score has a gracefully celebratory quality – but it also has layers, which the film mostly lacks.  (Hearing Delerue’s music again made me wonder if Geoffrey Burgon drew on it for the television Brideshead Revisited in 1981.)  One other thing I enjoyed.  In 1973, when Day for Night was released, I remember it being raved about by critics and award-givers (it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and the BAFTA for Best Film).  I didn’t really like it but I felt I couldn’t argue then.   At least I can now.

    21 February 2011

  • The Passion of Joan of Arc

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La passion de Jeanne d’Arc

    Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)

    I’ve not seen much silent film drama.  I’d never seen a silent film like this classic of the genre, which is claustrophobic and concentrated.   The dialogue comprises verbatim extracts from the original transcript of Joan’s trial in 1431, which I was amazed to learn had been preserved.  (According to Wikipedia: ‘During the investigation and trial itself, a trio of notaries, headed by chief notary Guillaume Manchon, took notes in French which were then collated each day following the trial session. Four years later (at the earliest), these records were translated into Latin by Manchon and University of Paris master Thomas de Courcelles. Five copies were produced, three of which are still in existence’.)  So the film is, for starters, a unique courtroom drama.   Every face on the screen is extraordinary.  Although they often suggest physiognomic types familiar from Renaissance portraiture, these faces have a warts-and-all reality and individuality.  Dreyer uses minimal backgrounds to throw them into relief and, as the film progresses, the looks of some of Joan’s accusers and others present at the trial begin to take on more complex shadings:  their harsh hostility is modified.  The expressions of a couple of the venerable churchmen who are trying Joan for blasphemy are particularly strong in this respect.  They are baffled by her – she seems to be invading the formal certainties of their religion.

    Because the film is from another age and the physical casting is so brilliant, there are moments when you feel the impossible is happening – that you’re witnessing the historical event.  Watching the actors’ mouths move as they speak the words that were spoken at the actual trial increases that impression.  This octogenarian work is technically astonishing and Dreyer’s orchestration of the final sequence, when Joan is burned at the stake, phenomenal.  Even in a picture made today, the cross-cutting and shots down to the crowds teeming along cobbled paths would be remarkable.  The way in which Joan keeps seeing dark birds in the sky is wonderfully individual and convincing.  Dreyer is masterly in juxtaposing crowd shots with a focus on particular, always arresting faces.

    Joan is played by the Corsican actress Maria (real names Renée Jeanne) Falconetti – until then best known as a stage comedienne (as the handout and introduction at the BFI screening explained).  Falconetti’s performance seems – in comparison with the others in the film – relatively stylized.  She goes through repeated sequences of facial expression and head movement – which have an accumulating, absorbing power.  Her transmission of Joan’s fervour – from within herself and under the pressure of extreme, unremitting close-up (which in itself chimes with the relentless interrogation of Joan) – is beyond praise.   She has an androgynous quality (I remembered a little way into the film Pauline Kael’s review of The Deer Hunter, in which she noted Christopher Walken’s resemblance to Falconetti).  She is deeply impressive at the moments when Joan comes up with clever answers to the intellectually sophisticated judges.  Kevin Brownlow’s introduction quoted as an example the exchange:

    Q:  Are you in a state of grace?

    A:  If I am, may God keep me in it.  If I’m not, may God put me there.

    Falconetti is convincing as an uneducated rustic who wouldn’t naturally be able to express herself in this way and her responses take a little time to emerge.  The effect is startling:  Joan really does seem to be inspired by something beyond her.  (It’s very different from the sustained epigrammatic assurance of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.)

    This screening was one of the BFI’s finer hours (and the fact that the sold-out performance was in NFT2 probably helped to ensure that it started on time).  Kevin Brownlow’s introduction was completely audible, clearly structured and richly informative.  Perfectly prepared, he spoke with authority and humour:  he immediately acknowledged his debt to a Danish film historian who features on the DVD of La passion which Brownlow particularly recommended.  He charmingly admitted his disappointment at learning that Dreyer had wanted to make the film with sound (but there was no French studio with sound facilities at the time).   Brownlow was right to recommend the excellent handout for the show – a 1980 piece by Eileen Bowser of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  He was also thoughtful enough to give a nod in his introduction to the pianist Neil Brand, whose playing accompanied the screening (even though the film was originally shown – as Dreyer had intended – without music).  It was just as well that Brownlow had this courteous forethought.  Although there was applause at the end of the film, this wasn’t explicit acclaim for the admirable Brand – who had to get up from his piano stool and make his way out with the rest of the audience.  You could see how physically demanding the performance had been for him.

    The cast includes Eugène Silvain, as the bishop who leads the interrogation; Antonin Artaud, ardently expressive as the young priest who is desperate for Joan to recant; Michel Simon, as one of the judges; and, according to Kevin Brownlow, the (uncredited) former proprietor of the St Petersburg restaurant from where Rasputin was abducted on the night of his murder!    The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté. The sets were by Jean Hugo and Hermann Warm and the costumes by Valentine Hugo.  Joseph Delteil worked with Dreyer on the screenplay (and Dreyer also edited the film, with Marguerite Beaugé).  Another unusual pleasure for me was that, since I can still read French reasonably well though I can’t keep up with spoken French, I was able to follow the film more or less through the French legends, without needing to look at their English subtitles.

    18 May 2009

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