Film Review: "Day for Night"

La Nuit Americaine or Day for Night is a film by Francois Truffaut and best foreign language winner at the Academy Awards in 1973. Day for Night is really a simple story that tells of the painstaking career of filmmaking. Francois Truffaut plays a director named Ferrand who is making a French film called 'Pamela' about a woman who falls in love with her fiancée's father. The film not only deals with the technical difficulties of producing a film, but also the relational hardships. The actors and crew fall in and out of love as a near parallel to the story of Pamela in the movie they are creating. The inconsistencies of personality are mirrored in the production and the actual story exposed to viewers.

The beauty of Day for Night remains in the accurate portrayal of filmmaking. Ferrand is troubled the entire film about finishing in his scheduled seven weeks when complications such as death, pregnancy, divorce, depression appear on top of the usual scheduling and continuity issues. The film is almost like a woven fabric, interlacing stories so intricately, you almost forget who is in love with who and why. The audience almost loses themselves in what is really a mundane soap opera of a film, but highly enticing because of the manner in which it was presented. Ferrand makes an observant comment during the middle of the film: "Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive." Ferrand faces this very sentiment when actors threaten to back out of the movie, the shooting is far off-schedule and a supporting actor dies mid-production.

An astonishing aspect of this film is that really, Truffaut had to make two films. He had to shoot portions of 'Pamela' as well as film Day for Night. The story of Day for Night works very well, and the technical aspects of the film were also very strong. The cinematography had to often work two-fold, first in the filming of 'Pamela' and then showing the filming of that production through an entirely second crew. The editing was very strong, mixing portions of 'Pamela' with Day for Night. The opening sequence was, for example, made very strong by including the director's 'Cut!' at the very end, revealing to the audience that they would be watching the production of a production. It was also brilliant how the story of Pamela was revealed through the film. The story was told completely out of order, because that is how they filmed it. The first scene shot is actually near the end of the film, and the last scene shot was the ending, but not nearly what they had anticipated on that first day of shooting. The production then moves from beginning to end to middle, back to beginning in sequence of how the scheduling works out. But somehow, even throughout this discontinuous portrayal of Pamela's story, we still have the same story structure evident in most films. At first, we anticipate the arrival of Julie and grow concerned for Alphonse's instability. The audience is left on their seats when Alexandre dies and we do not know whether the film will finish. Every character seems to have their own turning points and plots. Even Bernard, the prop man receives sympathy for his mistreatment and cheers for his scandalous sex scene with Joelle, the script girl.

Day for night is a technique in filmmaking that creates the illusion of night through the adjustment of aperture and use of filters. Day for Night as a film is just that. Truffaut tells a story of adjustment, of flexibility. It not only represents an accurate portrayal of filmmaking, it also depicts life. Life is not certain, love is not certain and filmmaking is most definitely not for certain. The crew learns that life is not for certain when they observe the accidental death of Alexandre. Alphonse learns that woman are indeed, not magic, they are just people, like him with their own problems. Perhaps Truffaut has it right in just hoping to survive, taking the hits as they come. Nothing is for certain, but everything can be achieved, that is Day for Night.