La nuit américaine [Day for Night] (1973)

(On Cable TV, June 2019) I am a very indulgent viewer for movies that talk about movies, so it was almost inevitable that I’d have a soft spot for La nuit américaine, a rather fun film describing the filming of a French melodrama. It does feature clever meta-textual stuff that will make more sense the more you know about movies. It’s written and directed by François Truffaut, who also turns in a suitably sympathetic performance as the in-movie writer-director. The usual happens—production problems, neurotic actors, cast/crew hanky-panky, and serious accidents (of them, fatal, happens offscreen and is played for mostly laughs as if the actor had disappeared abruptly from La nuit américaine itself). It’s also a look at early-1970s studio-based filmmaking, with Truffaut explicitly closing on a mournful note that movies should not go to the street and entirely abandon their own specialized filmmaking environment. Compared to other French New Wave movie, it’s surprisingly funny—although, by 1973, you can make an argument that the New Wave was becoming undistinguishable from the rest of the filmmaking ocean. It’s generally about the relationship that the cast and crew have with making movies—as one character says, “I’d leave a man for a movie, but I’d never leave a movie for a man”—no wonder Hollywood loved this film and gave it an Academy Award. (An interesting bit of trivia is that it was nominated for Oscars two years in a row: first winning the foreign film award for 1973, then nominated for three more Academy Awards for its 1974 American run.)  La nuit américaine may or may not have aged not-so-well—I suspect that while it remains charming and fun today, it’s not quite a fresh or new or revelatory as it must have seemed to an audience decades before lengthy making-of movies (sometimes more interesting than the movies they depict) became such a staple of DVDs and online promotional material.