Recensioni de* critic*

What I love about Truffaut is that he’s a modernizer and a revisionist. He’s taking care of the tradition, but at the same time he’s inventing new forms. I think this film is a testament to his love of filmmaking and to its absurdity.

Funny even in its darker moments and emotional in its revealing of lighting sources (I find a scene with a fake candle, magical and obvious at the same time, particularly moving), it's Truffaut's best film.

Truffaut's intention was to celebrate his chosen career, and he keeps the tone lightly amusing even when things are ostensibly going to hell. (The death of a major character at one point is all but shrugged off—"the show must go on.") Consequently, while the film is thoroughly enjoyable, it lacks the bite and wit of Truffaut's best work. It's a gooey love letter to itself, which makes it feel a tad redundant.

Cinema as self-affirmation, moviemaking as a source of passion—these became beacons for the American independent movement in the 1990s and, for my money, all of this can be traced to Truffaut, specifically Day for Night, where his years of failed commercial ventures resulted in a helpless plea for authorial significance.

Somehow, despite our high expectations, the movie still manages to surprise us with how good it is—it's magical, in fact. Nothing in it feels like the product of meticulous design, even as the craft behind the simplest moments of a feature film is exposed. Depicting the shoot, from first day to last, of a movie called Meet Pamela, Day for Night seems effortless, as if this was the movie Truffaut had been preparing for all his life.

It's a hilarious and informative movie, and in the pantheon of films about filmmaking, it strikes a neat balance between the operatic neuroses of ‘8 1/2' and the warm, pastel-hued nostalgia of ‘Singin' in the Rain'.

There is so much that one can say about Day for Night. However, since it is impossible to mention every fine performance and notable scene, whether comic or melodramatic, I simply will not try and will rather focus on a single aspect: the central position the film takes in the life and work of François Truffaut...

...La Nuite américaine (Day for Night, 1973) summarised all of this passion in one single film and what we see is the grateful existence of a man, an authentic declaration of faith in an art.

Gentle, bittersweet wisdom is the keynote here, as a rich ensemble of performers share fleeting lessons in life, love and loss. The film deftly sketches a very wide range of characters, who are cleverly compared on certain points: for example, their attitudes to casual sex (tragic and histrionic for Jacqueline Bisset's happily married character once Léaud makes their liaison public, flippant for Natalie Baye as a no-nonsense assistant director).

Francois Truffaut's comic and affectionate 1973 portrait of the joys, tragedies, frustrations, and compromises that surround the shooting of a feature film. An episodic and amiable work, although the sudden reaches for profundity don't quite come off.

Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine (‘Day for Night' — a technical movie term) is at least as slick as Electra Glide in Blueand The Hireling, but it also happens to be the most entertaining thing he's done in years, combining the gentle charm of Stolen Kisses with some of the more pedagogical, instructional aspects of L'Enfant Sauvage.