Day for Night (1973)

François Truffaut's Day for Night concerns the making of a film and the small catastrophes that attend it: an actor's death, an unexpected pregnancy, a nervous breakdown, a string of romantic betrayals that resolve into very little. The picture is dedicated to the Gish sisters and populated by performers selected for star quality and linguistic convenience. No casting agenda animates the ensemble. Race never surfaces as a subject. No LGBTQ storyline troubles the heterosexual roundelay. The environment goes unmentioned. Alphonse's infantile tantrums and Julie's exhaustion are fuel for melodrama, not identity. On seven of our ten measures, the film is a clean slate, which is not an accusation, merely a finding.

Where the film registers at all, it registers faintly. Bisset observed that Truffaut liked working with women, and the actresses here are granted interiority, wit, and a certain weary competence. That is humane character writing, not a thesis. The script glances at the commercial machinery surrounding artistic labor, then adores the machinery anyway. Truffaut built the thing as a love letter to his trade, and love letters do not indict. The only sermonizing on offer concerns craft: how to fake night with a filter, why a tracking shot moves us. The lecturing is about cinema, never about politics.

Godard walked out in disgust and called it a lie, which remains the most energetic review the film has received. Everyone else lined up to call it the most beloved movie ever made about movies, and the Academy handed it a statuette for Best Foreign Language Film. It is warm, it is skillful, and it is untroubled by the questions that occupy our present moment. We classify it accordingly: enormous charm, negligible contemporary social consciousness. It means no harm. It also means nothing of the kind we now require of it.

Returned for the record with a straight face and a mild sigh. The classification stands.

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