Day for Night

Truffaut’s joyous love letter to the art and craft of moviemaking stars the filmmaker himself as Ferrand, the director of a tawdry melodrama trying his best to keep the seemingly cursed production on track while off-screen dramas and romantic complications swirl around him. Jacqueline Bisset is the troubled Hollywood starlet recovering from a nervous breakdown, while Jean-Pierre Léaud is Alphonse, the impetuous leading man who just wants to know: are women magic? Ferrand’s relationship with Alphonse is especially poignant for the father-son relationship Truffaut and Léaud held in real life, made all the more touching when Ferrand confides, “People like you, like me, you know well, we are made to be happy in the work of cinema.”