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