Jean-Pierre Léaud

Day for Night (1973)

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One of my weaknesses as a critical thinker is that I’m pathetically vulnerable to enjoying movies about how great The Movies are, from nostalgic recreations of large-scale Old Hollywood spectacles in movies like Hail, Caesar! to comedic takes on scrappy D.I.Y. communal filmmaking in low-budget genre trash like One Cut of the Dead.  I even choke up during those hokey little Magic of the Movies montages that everyone else complains about during Oscars broadcasts every year.  The same goes for poems about poetry and rock songs about rocking out.  The creation of art ranks highly among the few worthy things you can do with your brief time on this planet, so it deserves to be the subject of that art just as much as the few other go-to subjects of every other song, poem, and movie out there (mainly God, sex, and death).  So, I’m less willing than most movie-obsessed cynics to roll my eyes when Oscar voters award top prizes to love-letter-to-cinema movies about The Movies.  I totally understand the impulse.  The cool, hip opinion to have is that Jean-Luc Godard’s poison-penned hate letters to cinema like The Image Book are much worthier of time and study than his intellectual frenemy François Truffaut’s magic-of-moviemaking dramedy Day for Night, because they are more challenging in their observation & interrogation of the medium.  The thing is, though, that as intellectually lazy as it may be, it feels much better to celebrate than to challenge, especially when the subject is as wonderful as the art of the moving image.  If my two choices as a cinephile are to be corny or self-loathing, I’m perfectly fine being corny.

Director François Truffaut stars in Day for Night as a François Truffaut-type director, lording over the film shoot of a mediocre-looking melodrama titled Meet Pamela.  The metatextual joke of the movie is that there’s nothing as dramatic nor exciting in the narrative of Meet Pamela as the drama & excitement of its production.  As the auteur du jour, Truffaut is responsible for guiding the decision-making of hundreds of cast & crew members, who bombard him with random, dissonant either/or questions as he attempts to funnel their chaotic input into a single, coherent picture.  The bigger personalities he struggles to manage are, of course, his actors, who include Fellini collaborator Valentina Cortese as a has-been drunk who refuses to learn her cues and longtime Truffaut muse Jean-Pierre Léaud as a “spoiled brat who will not grow up,” always angling to go to the movies instead of making one.  Newcomer chanteuse Dani also makes a star-making impact as the level-headed script girl who puts out the fires Truffaut himself does not notice, simply because she’s a true believer in the cause of Cinema.  Explaining her passion for the medium above all else, she sweetly declares “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy.”  True to the nature of real-life film production, most of the drama between these players occurs during the punishing rhythm of having to get multiple takes until a scene fully works or during the punishing boredom of time spent on set waiting around for those takes to be fully set up.  It’s essentially an ensemble cast comedy set in a hyper-specific industry & locale, made by the people who know that industry better than anyone else in the world.

Where Day for Night becomes a transcendent piece of art in its own right (rather than just an appreciation for the transcendent nature of art) is in the sweeping montages when all of these chaotic personalities are overpowered by the momentum of the production, and everything fall exactly into place.  The behind-the-camera busyness of the set is drowned out by heavy orchestration on the soundtrack, relaxing all tension & frustration with the stop-and-start repetition of filming a scene to instead ease into the flow of a shooting day where everything goes exactly right.  Given how many different, opposing people it takes to make a professional movie, it’s a miracle every time one is completed, let alone is any good.  Truffaut digs deep into the mechanics of how movies are made, to the point where it’s likely Day for Night was many people’s first instance of hearing the terms “headshots,” “pans,” “rushes,” and “reshoots” outside of the trades. You can tell that those practical details aren’t as interesting to him as the poetry that they produce, though, especially in scenes where he doesn’t bother hiding the shadow of the crane-shot camera crew shooting the fictional camera crew of the movie-within-the movie.  He puts a lot more care & effort into displaying a reading list of film books on the great auteurs, proudly displaying names like Dreyer, Bergman, and Buñuel for the camera while romantic orchestrations swells.  The only sequence where this mechanics-vs-poetry dynamic is flipped is the opener, where an extensive tracking shot full of life & wonder is revealed to be a movie-within-the-movie fake-out and is then broken down into individual, choreographed components through multiple takes.  Otherwise, it works the other way around; the mechanics come before the poetry.

I can only think of two instances in Day for Night wherein Truffaut becomes noticeably cynical about his craft.  The major one is in Léaud’s characterization as a petulant child who refuses to grow up, treating women as either caretakers or playthings depending on his scene-to-scene whims.  It’s very much the same fuckboy posturing that he displays in The Mother and the Whore, and both instances feel like a knowing commentary on the sexual & moral immaturity of Léaud’s generation, since he had become a kind of living mascot for The French New Wave as soon as Truffaut first cast him in The 400 Blows.  The other cynical note is a one-liner potshot at Hollywood as a competing movie industry, dismissing it as a playground “where kids try to live up to their famous parents.”  If Hollywood was offended by that friendly jab, they didn’t show it in their adoring appreciation of Day for Night, which they awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  In a way, the film is a major pioneer in the Magic of the Movies montages that have become an annual tradition for the ceremony’s television broadcasts, but with an obvious major difference.  Those montages only celebrate The Movies when they achieve transcendent visual poetry (and box office profits), whereas Truffaut loves The Movies as they are, warts & all.  You get the sense watching Day for Night that he genuinely enjoyed the chaos of wrangling brats, drunks, and freaks to make mediocre art in artificial locales; he loved making movies.  That might seem like a shallow subject to rigorous academic cynics or to more narrative-focused moviegoers who are just “looking for a good story,” but it feels deeply spiritual & meaningful to me, a guy who also loves The Movies.

-Brandon Ledet

The Death of Louis XIV (2017)

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Actor Jean-Pierre Léaud has worked with a long line of Important Auteurs in his near life-long career: Cocteau, Godard, Varda, Assayas. Only one has defined him as a cultural icon, though: François Truffaut. After casting the actor as the pint-sized star of his seminal work The 400 Blows, Truffaut fashioned Léaud as a human talisman of the French New Wave by continuing the story of his same character from that film, Antoine Doinel, in several other features. Cinephiles have watched Doinel, and by extension Leaud, grow up on celluloid, a journey that’s now been effectively completed in the recent period piece The Death of Louis XIV. Where as Léaud entered the scene a young, poor schoolboy in 400 Blows, he’s leaving it a dying, old king in The Death of Louis XIV. He explained in an interview, “The line has been crossed. I went all the way. I am not acting in that film. I am someone who is waiting for the meeting [with death].” The sadness of that statement and the cultural significance of Léaud’s effective departure from cinema are both undeniable. What is up for debate, however, is if the film itself is at all worthwhile when stripped of its context.

At the start of The Death of Louis XIV, Léaud’s historical monarch is already bedridden by an injury to his leg. He indulges in small joys like playing with his beautifully groomed hounds or putting on a show of tipping his hat to the women who visit his chamber, but mostly he is immobile and in pain. Doctors are confident they can treat the king without amputating his leg to stave off encroaching gangrene. Consultants as wide ranging as university professors and common snake oil salesmen are summoned to treat the king in a variety of highly questionable methods, all while his leg continually worsens, turns black, and, as both the title and Wikipedia promise, takes his life. There’s a (very) dry sense of humor in the way these royal doctors hold onto old world superstitions & remedies. They humorously excite with any sign that the king’s condition is improving, even openly applauding when he manages to swallow a single bite of food. Even the king’s eventual death doesn’t stop them from examining his condition with an unending dedication to optimism. In a concluding autopsy, they examine his exhumed organs for signs of inflammation and abnormality. That scene somehow sticks to the same exact tone that dominated the two hours that preceded it. Even in death, nothing changes.

If there’s some kind of metaphorical correlation between the ways the dying king & Léaud ‘s career were doted on, yet left to rot, I was either too dense to understand it or too bored to fully care. The Death of Louis XIV is above all else a highfalutin bore, recommendable only to the most dedicated of French New Wave academics who have a completionist’s compulsion to watch their once-youthful mascot die. The film perfectly captures the stillness & exhaustion of waiting for death and occasionally searches for the humor of clashing the indignity of that condition with an ineffective excess of wealth. There’s a perverse joke in seeing Léaud’s upsetting little egg-shaped body slowly fail & give up while dressed in expensive fabrics & oversized wigs. The film also has a visually striking dedication to natural lighting, affording it the painting-in-motion look of something like The Witch or The Libertine. That sense of visual craft and the quiet meta humor of Léaud bowing out in such a compromised sense if indignity vs. royal reverence could’ve been captured in a series of photographs or even a short film, however. The Death of Louis XIV does very little to justify its medium as a feature film outside some occasional humor in the dialogue of unqualified medical men who watch idly as their King dies in what feels like real time. Mostly, the audience watches along with them, listening to the sound of a ticking clock. As an academic exercise, that might have some significance in helping contextualize Léaud’s​ career as an artist. As a cinematic experience, however, it feels like waiting for death, which is not an activity I’d readily recommend.

-Brandon Ledet