The movie is good on the details of how the crew is thrown together like a crazy family, with all the frictions and tensions yet all the affection that survives despite obnoxious behaviour. The history and greatness of cinema is evoked mainly by name-dropping rather than through the substance of what s shown - the film within the film, Meet Pamela, seems to be fairly inconsequential, and that quality sadly pervades Truffaut's film too. The elegant whirlwind of connections and incidents and couplings and mishaps seems partly like a self-regarding somewhat self-complimentary inside joke and partly just like an artistic trifle. Most lacking of all is the character of the director himself, who has less of a back story than almost any other and remains a cipher - less of a benevolent father (as perhaps intended) and more a passive functionary who sidesteps any ability the movie might have had to delve into the real nature of the medium. Touches like his using the Bisset character s real-life dialogue in an equivalent movie scene play with the boundary, but it's not much.
Review of Day for Night
