Day For Night is peppered with cinephilia. Jean-Pierre Léaud (Antoine from Truffaut's The 400 Blows) plays Alphonse, a bratty actor who's brought his girlfriend on location as script girl (that's "continuity" in today's language). When they arrive in Nice, she has procured a list of fine restaurants, but he will have none of it. "There are 37 cinemas in Nice," he says, insisting that they pick a feature and check the schedule. "If there's time, we'll have sandwiches." At one point, and for the sole benefit of the camera, Truffaut (playing a film director named Farrand) unloads a package full of books on some of his favorite directors: Vigo, Welles, Godard, Dreyer, Bresson, and Hitchcock. And the film would be worthwhile for, if nothing else, the black-and-white dream sequence showing a young Ferrand/Truffaut boosting lobby cards from a local cinema. As a peripheral concern, it's hard to imagine Jacqueline Bisset ever looking better on film.

Bisset arrives midway through, playing a beautiful English actress with a history of mental breakdowns. (Now that she has married a silver-haired doctor, it is hoped that she'll be able to make it through a shoot.) She joins a cast that already includes Alphonse, aging Italian beauty Severine (Valentina Cortese), and her former lover Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), now turned gay. The key truth of Day For Night may be that the bedroom farce ensuing behind the scenes is infinitely more interesting than the film that's actually being produced. It's a film that's being made with workmanlike dedication by a cast and crew that may not be geniuses, but who are skilled enough at what they do.

The film's original title is La nuit Américaine, which translates literally as "the American night." That's how French filmmakers referred to what Hollywood called day-for-night shooting -- footage is photographed in daylight, using filters that (it is hoped) make the scene look like it was shot at night. In other words, it's all about willful illusion, and here's a film that delights in showing the works behind the illusion, even as it casts its lot with the filmmakers. These folks don't confuse fantasy with reality, but they do substitute the world of movie-making for the world outside, in part because only one of those worlds makes then truly happy.

At one point, Ferrand muses that the kind of people who make movies are only happy in their work. That's why these folks are dedicated to their art, as tawdry as it may be, and why they wind up sleeping with one another rather than cultivating relationships outside of that inner circle. As Ferrand's assistant succinctly puts it, once the script girl has run off with the stuntman, "I've left a guy for a film, but I've never left a film for a guy." As an artist, the workmanlike Ferrand bears little resemblance to the poetic, groundbreaking Truffaut -- except, perhaps, when he cannibalizes the backstage woes of his actress in order to feed her screen life. At any rate, he's the unmistakable central figure in this, the metaphorical autobiography of a cinephile.

France, 1973