Word: truffauts
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...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 Léaud that "people like us are only happy in our work," or when Jacqueline Bisset risks a secure marriage to spend the night with Léaud-for reasons that seem both unconvincingly melodramatic and obscure-the movie begins to sound a little defensive and boosterish, like...
...movie misses, too, the air of real panic and urgency of, say, 8½. Truffaut means, instead, to convey the consuming romance of the film-making process. Several sequences do break through to some intensity: Cortèse'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 Cortèse 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...
FranÇois 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...
...pure fantasy in the film, however, is the hearing aid Truffaut wears for his characterization of the director. "I could have been thinking of Buñuel," 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...