Year: 1974
Cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Dani, François Truffaut, Alexandra Stewart, Jean Champion, Nathalie Baye, David Markham, Nike Arrighi, Bernard Ménez, Zénaïde Rossi
Director: François Truffaut
Nominations: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Cortese), Best Original Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film (1973)
As the tag line says, this movie bills itself as a "movie for people who love movies". Maybe a better one would say "a movie for people who love to learn about how movies are made".
What this movie is, essentially, is a movie showing us what went into making it. It's not literally a movie about filming this movie; it's a French melodrama about filming a French melodrama, all while the actors and crew go through similar things that the film-within-a-film's characters are going through. Mostly affairs.
François Truffaut himself plays Ferrand, the director in the film, trying to keep everything straight as chaos erupts around him, thanks to a man-child of a handsome young movie star (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a fading lush of a supporting actress who used to be a glamorous leading lady but now can't hold it together long enough to shoot a short scene (Valentina Cortese), a British leading lady who suffered a nervous breakdown on the set of her last film, a pregnant supporting player whose character is not supposed to be (and who grows visibly more so as the shoot continues) not to mention constant set and prop issues.
It all comes together to make a delightful and eye-opening look at the world of cinema. It's funny, it's heart-breaking and it never takes things so far that we feel we're descending into parody. In fact it all feels very real, like you get the feeling that when the cameras stopped rolling it all kept going just like this. I've seen many movies about making movies, and this one might be the best of all. Truffaut was nominated for Best Director for this film and how could he not have been? We see his directorial efforts more directly than we likely ever will again.
The cast is filled with colorful characters, my personal favorites being Léaud as Alphonse, a young actor in his twenties who's basically an unsupervised toddler (a running gag is him frequently asking the other men around him "do you think women are magical?", and he seems to be asking in all sincerity), Joëlle (Nathalie Baye), the plucky script supervisor who almost seems to be the one guiding Ferrand through directing this thing, and Aumont as Alexandre, an aging leading man who quietly kinda/sorta comes out to his ex-lover, who also happens to be playing his wife in the film.
Said ex-lover is Séverine (Cortese) an Italian actress who's losing her looks and her abilities (in the scene she can't get right, we see her lines taped to numerous props), who must be kept happy at all times (no points for guessing whether or not this effort is successful). She's hilarious and very showy, but I still think the other characters I named rank above her. She's also not in the movie very much, which doesn't mean she shouldn't have been nominated, and to be frank her diva-in-distress was just about the most Oscar-worthy performance in the film, considering how well she convinced us that she was having trouble acting.
What I really loved was seeing the various ways that real life affected the film shoot; dealing with the pregnant actress, Joëlle suggests writing her pregnancy in, which Ferrand is all for until he realizes that this will make people think the baby is Alphonse's. In the end they decide to shoot as much of her as they can before she starts to show. It doesn't hold.
Even the title of this movie (both of them!) is a behind-the scenes term, for when you shoot a night scene in the daytime by putting a filter over the lens. In France they call this La Nuit Américaine ("The American Night" and this film's French title) while in America it's called, you guessed it "bright outside, dim inside". No, seriously, it's called, as I'm sure you guessed, Day for Night.
Don't worry yourself about having to "read" a movie with subtitles if you don't speak French, just make sure that if you enjoy movies at all, especially if you enjoy knowing how they're made, see this. A good time is guaranteed.
I'll be watching the first two, perhaps three, Godfather movies this week, and then Murder on the Orient Express to finish off this category, so forgive me if the posting is more sporadic.
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