A Sly, Loving Tribute to Film Making

By JAY COCKS

DAY FOR NIGHT

Directed by FRANC,OIS TRUFFAUT

Screenplay by FRANC,OIS 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 Leaud); 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 Cortese). 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 (Zenaide 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.

Truffaut chronicles all their vagaries with tolerance and bemusement. He makes film making, even at its most scrambled, seem wonderfully fulfilling. The general air of celebration is seductive, but it dulls from time to time the film's cunning edge of irony. When Truffaut reassures a distraught Jean-Pierre Leaud that "people like us are only happy in our work," or when Jacqueline Bisset risks a secure marriage to spend the night with Leaud--for reasons that seem both unconvincingly melodramatic and obscure--the movie begins to sound a little defensive and boosterish, like a chorus of There's No Business like Show Business.

The movie misses, too, the air of real panic and urgency of, say, 8 1/2. Truffaut means, instead, to convey the consuming romance of the film-making process. Several sequences do break through to some intensity: Cortese's muffing of a simple scene that starts comically and turns, with each of the actress's false starts and flailings, into a cameo of desperation; the director's dream recollection of his youth, when he sneaked down a street late one night and stole some Citizen Kane stills from outside a theater.

There are also some excellent performances, especially by Cortese and Baye, and Truffaut's style flows easily. Day for Night has grace, wit and affection enough to be one of the fondest compliments the movies have ever been paid--a tribute to all the dream spinners by one of the best.

--Jay Cocks

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FranC,ois Truffaut took notes on Day for Night for four years, jotting down stories he heard about film making or incidents that had happened in the past on his own sets. One of the many problems that plague the production of Meet Pamela--an insurance company balks at backing a skittish leading lady--came from a similar wrangle over Julie Christie when Truffaut was preparing Fahrenheit 451. A scene of a cat lapping milk off a breakfast tray, simple in conception but tortuous in execution because of a recalcitrant feline, had its origins in a similar sequence in The Soft Skin. The prototype of Truffaut's assistant in the picture is his real-life assistant, Suzanne Schiffman.

One bit of pure fantasy in the film, however, is the hearing aid Truffaut wears for his characterization of the director. "I could have been thinking of Bunuel," Truffaut said last week in New York, where Day for Night opened the eleventh New York Film Festival. "But actually I had no one particular in mind. For me, the hearing aid is more symbolic. It emphasizes how a director is isolated during shooting, how he hears only things about the film."

This film maker's isolation is some thing Truffaut carries over into his personal life as well. A slight, intense, diffident man, Truffaut lives in a modest rented apartment in the center of Paris. When he sees friends--like Fellow Film Makers Jacques Rivette or Claude Berri--he sees them at home over a quiet dinner. Divorced from his wife, he has been seen in company with Catherine Deneuve and, most recently, Jacqueline Bisset. "It is apparent from his films that he considers women an important part of his life," says an acquaintance. "But he is so terribly discreet that one never knows who his current interest is."

Truffaut's favorite pastime is work, usually on several things simultaneously. Once, when he took his two daughters on a vacation in Greece, he spent most of the time in his hotel room reading. He likes to prepare a new script while actually shooting another, even if the two are totally different in mood. "A film maker needs to contradict himself," he maintains. "Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, for instance, was a reaction to the sadness of Two English Girls."

Truffaut likes to change location as well as pace in his films. "I always resented people telling me 'It's too beautiful to go to the movies on a day like this.' So about three-quarters of the way through my films, I like to move out into the country, include some beautiful nature scenes to repay those people who are sitting inside the dark theater."

Such an ebullient attitude toward film making has, in part, made Truffaut one of the most affectionately regarded of all directors. Once he and his compatriots in the French New Wave were challenging many of the precepts of commercial film making. Now they find themselves ensconced inside it. "My age--41--is not a good one to strike up a rapport with youth," Truffaut reflects. "But I'll meet them again, through my films, in 20 years."

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