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| Jean-Pierre
Léaud, François Truffaut, Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina
Cortese, Dani, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean Champion |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Ferrand (François Truffaut):
Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old West. When you
start,
you
are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just
hope to survive.
The shoot of a simple romantic movie
is marred by various kinds of problems.
 While
not quite as fresh today as it must have been in 1973, when it
successfully revived Truffaut's career and won the Oscar for Best
Foreign-Language Picture, Day for Night is still a hugely
enjoyable insider's look at the crazily intimate work of film production.
More realistic than The Bad and the Beautiful and less
cynical than The Player, Truffaut's film was clearly made
in the Hollywood tradition of movies about movie-making, adding
the director's typically loose style and charming, fact-based anecdotal
structure to the familiar tropes of farcical behind-the-scenes
comedy. Truffaut makes fun of the slightly amateurish French film
industry and its intimate, improvisational way of filmmaking, while
mocking himself by playing the overly sincere director with a hearing
aid. |
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Different versions are available
for Region 1 and Region 2: the Region 1 release reportedly
has the better transfer, without any cropping to the frame
and with more natural colors. The supplements are also better
on the Region 1 release. The Region 2 DVD is available in
France as a two-disc set, the first disc of which has been
released separately elsewhere in Europe. The single-disc
Region 2 release served as the basis for this review.
The anamorphic widescreen
image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx. 1.66:1, cropping
the image down from the more accurate 1.78:1 framing featured
on the Region 1 DVD release, and including shots that were
clearly zoomed. The transfer also has a reddish hue that
casts an unnatural light on the entire transfer. None of
this truly ruins the film, which doesn't rely on cinematography
for its most important effects, but this inferior transfer
is a disappointment nonetheless.
The stereo sound mix is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0, and
sounds clear and uncomplicated, with a slightly dated dynamic
reach but otherwise no problems.
Released as a two-disc set
only in France, the single-disc European release mistakenly
lists all the extra features from the two-disc set on the
box, while including only those from the first disc on the
DVD itself. Adding insult to injury, the audio commentary by
Nathalie Baye is in French only, with no subtitles whatsoever.
The only supplement of any value to those not wholly fluent
in French is the introduction to the film
by cinema expert and long-time Truffaut collaborator Serge
Toubiana, whose six-minute track offers the appropriate amount
of context for placing the film within Truffaut's career
as a director. The
animated menus have been nicely designed, incorporating details
from movie cameras' technical functions, with footage from the
film playing in the background.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
September 1, 2003
Click
here for IMDB info on Day
for Night.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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