We come to expect certain things when we watch a movie. If a big introductory shot shows a lot of people, it eventually lingers and picks out the handsome guy in the crowd who will quickly become our focus for the next two hours. But in “Day for Night,” the camera plays a trick on us, diverting our attention several times over before coming back to that first man.
But even that’s a trick, because it’s all a part of one big scene in a movie, and the take needs to be done again. We’ve seen intros like this so many times, but few directors have ever asked us to look twice.
Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” is one of the great movies about the movies. It’s a funny, ironic ode to cinema that simultaneously celebrates the realism of film while scoffing at the phoniness of big studio productions.
It tells the story of a director (Truffaut himself) making a movie in France with an American star on a small budget and schedule. The movie is “Meet Pamela,” a melodrama of questionable quality in which a newly married woman ends up having an affair with her new father-in-law. It seems to be of questionable quality because even the actors are delivering the same token line of description and sincerity to the French press.
Truffaut plucks the plot of the fake movie and embeds it in the real life story, an equally silly melodrama of sex and affairs and a disastrous production at every turn. But where he’s doubly clever is that the director is pulling people and things from real life to try and tell his movie. His lead star Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) tells the press why her character’s dilemma is so tragic, and he puts her quote directly into the script. He steals flower pots and cars that can look better on set, and all the while his job seems to be less focused on art than on just delivering the final product.
“Day for Night” elegantly covers all aspects of the movie industry without being either a blanket satire or an homage. Truffaut’s characters are far from archetypes, and they interact in a casual, Altman-esque way, presenting the actors who can’t bring themselves to accomplish the simplest scene, the lazy prop people, a difficult and stingy producer and especially the strange people who seem to show up on set in place of the important people who always vanish. The movie has some fun with an elderly wife of one of the assistant directors who suspects her husband is cheating based on the lascivious “movie world” he’s a part of.
One of the fake movie’s stars Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud) repeatedly asks, “Are women magic?” “Everyone’s magic, and no one is,” Julie says, alluding clearly to cinema itself. Truffaut shows that the movie’s aren’t magic; they’re a working man’s game where even an actor pulls a 15-hour day and everyone seems either unhappy or incompetent in their jobs. They’ll go to ridiculous depths to finish a movie just when everything has gone completely wrong, and in their phony attempt they’ll spell the death of the studio system.
And yet unlike films that honor the movies today, such a movie grew out of the time when “cinema is king.” Movies will be made best on the streets with simple equipment and non-actors, and they’ll follow in the tradition and mindset that Francois Truffaut himself helped establish.