A classic “movie about movies” offers escapism behind the scenes
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch moving from July to October, we’re singling out other ensemble comedies to watch instead.
Day For Night (1973)
It’s been observed time and again that Meet Pamela, the fictional film-within-a-film whose occasionally rocky production is the backdrop of François Truffaut’s comedy Day For Night, doesn’t resemble a real movie. Certainly it has the plot of a bad drama, perhaps even one that might have been made in France in the early 1970s (though not by someone of Truffaut’s caliber). A young man brings his English fiancée home to meet his parents; she begins an affair with his father; the end is tragic. But as directed by Ferrand, the deaf movie-maker played by Truffaut himself, Meet Pamela comes across as illogical and stilted, its every scene filmed in long takes that are invariably ruined by some flub at the end: a slap that looks too phony, an actor who keeps trying to exit through the wrong door, a kitten that refuses to lap a plate of cream.
At times, Meet Pamela seems no more real than the impenetrably abstract adaptation of The Odyssey that figures in Godard’s bitter, disenchanted Contempt, which has often been referred to as the mirror opposite of Truffaut’s wry and gooey love letter to the fakery of cinema. One might even argue that Day For Night’s portrayal of collective life behind the scenes owes as much to the stage as to the screen, despite the unprecedented attention lavished on the minutiae of movie-making: the couplings; the backstage farce; the fact that Meet Pamela acts as something of a play-within-a-play, paralleling the personal lives of the cast. Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who plays the young man, is jealous; Julie (Jacqueline Bisset), who plays his English fiancée, is carrying on a relationship with a much older man; Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), who plays the young man’s father, once had an affair with Séverine (Valentina Cortese), the actress cast as his wife.
