Day for Night

Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973) is François Truffaut's Oscar-winning comedy-drama — watch it online on iFILM. Truffaut himself plays Ferrand, a director shooting a melodrama at the Victorine Studios in Nice, and the film runs in parallel: the movie-within-a-movie, and everything going wrong around it.

The title is a cinematography term — shooting daylight scenes through a dark filter to simulate night. It fits. What Ferrand manages on set each day is its own kind of illusion. One actress is struggling with alcohol, another has an unexpected pregnancy to hide, a lead forgets his lines under pressure, and the American star played by Jacqueline Bisset arrives carrying private turbulence that nobody accounted for. Valentina Cortese, playing a veteran actor who can't hold her cue cards together, got an Academy Award nomination for the role.

Truffaut made this as a love letter to the craft — specifically to the people who hold a production together through chaos they never put in the budget. It picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974. You don't need to know the French New Wave to enjoy it, but if you do, the layers multiply. Stream Day for Night (1973) online on iFILM.