DAY FOR NIGHT (French) (1973)

Along with the pioneer and his mentor Jean Luc Goddard, Director Francois Truffaut is the hallmark of French New wave Cinema. Although he made this film in the later part of his career, it brought him coveted Oscar trophy of Best Foreign Language Film. It’s perhaps the best example of Film within film with having a close look inside the process of film making. Jaqueline Bisset looks exquisitely beautiful Hollywood heroine played the role of Pamela inside the film and Director and auteur Francois Truffaut himself played the role of director inside this film within film.

The story of the film that the director and crew is shooting concerning with a young man who marries a beautiful English girl and after three months he brings her to his parents’ Riviera home. The father-in-law mutually falls in love with his daughter-in-law. The film deals with the flight of this illicit relationship and as in tragedy, each character meets his inevitable destiny.

Jump cuts are natural for Truffaut film however here only few shots having hand held camera use. He used more static shots here. Keeping apart the shooting of the film, this film shows us that how hard is it to shoot a film for a French individual director who has to juggle with profit interested producer, image conscious stars, shooting difficulties and developing inter personal relationship between actors of his film. From selecting costumes to casting and from shooting to editing, the director has a heavy duty to perform multi tasks in stipulated schedule of production. There are some of scenes which show us the real face of film world. There is a shooting scene in a film where a drunken heroine failed to utter lines and crew come to her rescue with a trick of pasted papers of her dialogue lines and still at the end of each take she messed the scene so terribly. The film also shows some of the ugly but real fact of glamour world like even before heroine goes to shoot the first scene on the set, she has to present for press conference to make film publicity with insistence of producer and has to answer certain nerd questions regarding the film when she don’t read the script even.

Ratings-7.5/10