Watch Day for Night For Free

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Movie about a movie who's director is the director of the movie's movie. Nice to have a look behind the scenes of film making, although much of it looks rather staged, including bad acting and over-acting. Which makes the fictional movie about people making a movie really looks like people making a fictional movie. In a movie that you don't really like, sometimes there's one scene that almost makes up for the rest of the movie. A scene that you will probably never forget. Like the Japanese guy doing a karaoke act of the Sex Pistols in Lost In Translation, here the WOW scene is the short cat intermezzo. Silence... tension...touched... A moment of true movie magic.

Director Ferrand (François Truffaut) struggles with many challenges to finish shooting his film "Je vous presente Pamela". Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) is a British actress struggling with personal issues. This film follows the many people associated with the production.This is a classic film from iconic French director François Truffaut. He's playing with many modern meta filmmaking ideas. It is a film within a film. It has quasi-documentary techniques. The characters are a little hard to keep track. Other than Bisset and Truffaut, I'm not familiar with any of the other actors. It makes it harder to follow. The most memorable are little filmmaking triumphs like the candle and the cat. This is a movie at the foremost front.

Truffaut -how shall I say this?- is grossly overrated. I did my homework: I have now seen 5 of his movies and I am stunned by the attention such an inept filmmaker has commanded over the years in critics' writings. What on earth is there to praise in Truffaut's flaccid movies? They all feel to me like a high school kid fond of cinema made them: immature and clichéd in both content and form. Critics, open your eyes: this a filmmaker who has botched every good plot he was given (Mississipi Siren, Les 2 Anglaises et le Continent, The Bride Wore Black) misused great actors (Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau) and overused very bad actors (Jean-Pierre Leaud, who, after his miraculous turn as a child in The 400 Blows, was never able to speak or act in a compelling or even noticeable manner. There he is again in Day For Night, flat as a failed soufflé, bland as porridge. And we are supposed to believe he seduces Jacqueline Bisset in this story?! Casting, people, casting!) Day For Night features characters that are cardboard cutouts, actors that have clichés dialogs to emote to, situations that feels forced or trite. It is lightweight material, from which you come out vaguely entertained, and mostly frustrated: what a waste of time, and all this national and international praise for such fluff? Did I learn anything from this movie? Did it make me think, did parts of it resonate in my life or mind, did it make me want to see more or do something better with my life? Was there any real emotion on screen?I saw recently in my local art house theater "A Nos Amours" of Maurice Pialat. Same country, same generation of filmmaker, but oh what a difference of authenticity and competency. Time to throw off the false gods and promote quality: bury Godard, forget Truffaut -watch Pialat, and feel something.

Magic tricks are not as interesting when you know how they are done and this movie, which shows a behind-the-scenes look at how a movie is made, left me feeling that I will now be less susceptible to the illusions movies try to create.Francois Truffaut plays a movie director on the set of a movie titled "Meet Pamela." The story is clearly so autobiographical that I don't know why Truffaut gave himself the fictional name of Ferrand. Ferrand is seen in a state of turmoil having to make a dozen decisions a minute, having to contend with constant interruptions, having to deal with the personal problems of the actors, and so forth, all while trying to direct. Truffaut wants us to see that the pressures on a movie director are *enormous*. Pity the director.The opening scene has Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) emerging from a subway into a busy street scene. This scene sets you up for what is to come, since it seemed so staged. Indeed, the camera pulls back to see Ferrand directing this scene from "Meet Pamela." Ferrand tries to control all the action, like how fast a woman is walking with her dog, how Alphonse should walk, exactly when a car should arrive on the scene, and so forth. Trying for such tight control results in obvious fakery. Perhaps a more generous analysis would be that Truffaut is purposefully trying for artificiality in order to establish that "Meet Pamela" is a bit of dog.This is no "8 1/2," since the focus is on the mechanics of movie making rather than the psyche of the director. We see fake snow, a candle lighted from its interior, wood in a fireplace lighted by gas, and so on. The most elaborate set made to deceive has the construction of an elevated platform placed so that it can be made to appear that the actors on it are across the street from a remote camera location on an upper floor.The acting is pedestrian for the most part with Jacqueline Bisset being the only one who is making an effort. I am sure that things can get pretty tedious on a movie set with multiple takes being done, but I did not feel that it was necessary to pound that point home to where I experienced the tedium myself as a viewer.I liked the look at the personal relationships among the cast and crew, how that during the filming a community is established. It is the exception that lasting relationships are formed. At the end of filming, the community collapses and everyone goes off in different directions. People come and go in anyone's life, but that phenomenon is exaggerated in the lives of movie people.