La Nuit américaine (1973)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

La Nuit américaine is a defining film in the oeuvre of François Truffaut, the one in which the director sets out to answer the question that he continued to ask throughout his life: "Is cinema more important than life?"  It is a film about the process of making a film, one of the best of its kind, but it is also Truffaut's most overt declaration of love to the art form to which he devoted his life and which became, literally, his raison d'être.  It is the only one of Truffaut's films to win an Oscar (in the category of Best Foreign Language Film), the film that set an unknown actress named Nathalie Baye on the road to stardom, and the one and only film in which the esteemed British writer Graham Greene appears (albeit in a small cameo role).  But what makes it special is the unbridled enthusiasm for his art that Truffaut manages to get across in this, his most humorous, most vibrant, and, possibly, most revealing film.

After the spectacular failure of his preceding two films, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) and Une belle fille comme moi (1972), François Truffaut would have been forgiven for tackling a far safer subject than this.  At the time, films about filmmaking were considered highbrow - Fellini's 8½ (1963) and Godard's Le Mépris (1965) bore this out - and so Truffaut had tremendous difficulty raising the finance for La Nuit américaine.  The fact that the director was emotionally unstable (he still hadn't recovered from his devastating break-up with Catherine Denueve) made the venture even riskier, but Truffaut's self-doubt and heightened awareness of the pitfalls of filmmaking are probably what make La Nuit américaine such an authentic and memorable film.  Had it been made during earlier or later periods in Truffaut's career, when he was more certain of himself, it seems likely that it would have presented a far more rose-tinted view of his métier.  The nature of Truffaut's all-consuming passion is made to appear all the more extraordinary (if not downiright irrational) once our eyes have been opened to the seemingly endless succession of crises that a director has to cope with as he strives to make his artistic vision a reality.  Sisyphus's ordeal was as naught compared with the travails of a modern filmmaker, who must have the stamina of an Olympic athlete and the diplomatic skills of a peace envoy.

La Nuit américaine is famously the film that brought a definitive end to one of the most high profile friendships in the world of cinema.  After seeing the film at Cannes in 1973 (where it was screened to rapturous applause outside the competition), Jean-Luc Godard felt so disgusted by it that he wrote a strongly worded letter to Truffaut lambasting him for his apparent lack of honesty.  So hurt was he by this personal attack that Truffaut responded with an even more aggressive reply which made it clear he would have nothing further to do with the man who had been one of his closest friends since adolescence.  This falling out between two pillars of the French New Wave was inevitable, given their almost diametrically opposed views to commercial cinema.  This is immediately apparent when we compare La Nuit américaine with Godard's own film about the moviemaking industry, Le Mépris.  Both films make much of the conflict between artistic integrity and commercial reality, but whereas Truffaut's film is upbeat and presents this challenge in a positive light, Godard's is relentlessly cynical. 

The director that Truffaut himself plays in his film is both a hard-to-please artist (pity the cat who fails to perform on cue) and a pragmatic businessman, someone who looks for creative solutions for the problems that come his way.  By contrast, the director memorably portrayed by Fritz Lang in Le Mépris is little more than a studio lackey, his vision constantly trounced by his commercially minded producer. Godard's film is openly defeatist, an admission that a true auteur can never succeed within a commercial set-up.  Truffaut takes the contrary view in his film, and convinces us that cinema is resilient enough as an art form to withstand the corrupting influence of money grubbing executives.  The two films not only express the two directors' contrasting philosophies about filmmaking, they also reflect their very different personalities - Truffaut's optimism and all-encompassing love of cinema versus Godard's profound distrust of commercialism and obsessive striving for a specific kind of artistic truth.

La Nuit américaine may be an accurate representation of how films are made but it clearly is not intended as an autobiography.  The confident, down-to-Earth director, Ferrand, that Truffaut plays in the film is closer to how Godard saw him, not the deeply insecure and committed auteur that he was in reality.  The difference between Ferrand, the fictitious director, and Truffaut, the real McCoy, is striking and underlines one of the key themes of the film, which is the extent to which cinema 'borrows' from life and alters it, like a distorting mirror.  This is implied in the film's title, which refers to a technique for shooting a night-time scene in broad daylight (known as 'day for night' in the English-speaking world) and it is also apparent in the difference between the actors Ferrand is seen directing and the characters they play in the 'film within a film'.  The latter are crude exaggerations of the former, their lives governed by the rigid rules of film melodrama, whilst the 'real' actors appear more prone to spontaneous outbursts of whimsy.  It is interesting that most of the actors that Truffaut cast for this film are ones on whom their characters appear to be loosely modelled.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with Jean-Pierre Léaud, the temperamental young actor whom Truffaut had already employed on several earlier films as his screen alter ego Antoine Doinel. 

At one point, Truffaut likens a film to a train, running smoothly through the night without a break.  There is no place in cinema for the messiness of real life, argues Ferrand as he struggles to dissuade his actors from walking out on him.  But it is the real life messiness that interests Truffaut most, so the 'real story' of the film is one of fractured relationships, bruised egos and silly misunderstandings, the maelstrom from which the director must somehow extract a work of art.  It is a director's prerogative to edit out 'all the dull bits', but what remains must be the truth, not a synthetic substitute.    La Nuit américaine is not only a superb film about how films are made, it is also Truffaut's best riposte to those detractors, such as Godard, who accused him of selling out to commercial cinema.  Cinema is nothing if it is not true to life and this is why Truffaut found commercial success as an auteur - not because he betrayed artistic verity but because he venerated it and placed it at the centre of his art.  The immense box office success of La Nuit américaine, both at home and abroad, bears testimony to this fact.  The French New Wave may have breathed its last gasp but François Truffaut was still very much in the running, with some of his best work yet to come.

Film Synopsis

A film company is shooting the film Je vous présente Pamela in the south of France.  The tensions and problems that arise during the filming greatly surpass the drama of the film being made.  The leading lady, Julie, a Hollywood sensation, is recovering from a nervous breakdown, whilst her co-partner, Alphonse, is a temperamental young romantic suffering from violent mood swings.  Alexandre, a former matinee idol and apparently the most reliable actor, flits back and forth between the set and the airport hoping to meet up with his secret male lover, whilst his co-star, Séverine, a former lover of Alexandre, has difficulty remembering her lines and hits the bottle between emotional outbursts.  Ferrand, the director, is caught in this crossfire of tantrum and petty crises, struggling to keep things on course.  But things only seem to go from bad to worse...