LA NUIT AMERICAINE (DAY FOR NIGHT) (1973) ** (out of four) Image B+ Sound B Extras B

Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada or Compare Prices Francois Truffaut's Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine) reflects his axiomatic "I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the anguish of making cinema" to an unfortunately misanthropic T. A chilly yet precious creepshow (Georges Delerue's score calls to mind the unease of the archetypal minor-key pastoral music between killings in a slasher movie) about the goings-on behind the scenes of a production that's pre-satirizing Louis Malle's Damage, the film shows every actor to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and every female crew member to be a libidinous careerist. Don't be fooled by the few pokes that Truffaut takes at himself as Ferrand, the director of the piece-within-the-piece: he may show himself to abuse the trust of his leading lady (as in the scene where he incorporates her teary-eyed private confession into her character's big monologue), but he never punishes himself for it, and in an even more fantastic display of narcissism, Ferrand is seldom shown communicating with his cinematographer--at the end of the shoot, they share the following exchange: "Great camera work;" "Glad you liked it!" (!) In Day for Night, Truffaut garnishes deep resentments with auteurist hype. They gave him an Oscar for it. Presented on Warner's DVD in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with one-channel monaural sound, Day for Night looks handsome on disc and sounds shockingly full. Print damage is mild and colour and detail are sublime; the film hasn't shone with such brilliance since its theatrical release, I'd wager. The extras, while plentiful, are yet another batch of featurettes undone by Laurent Bouzereau-isms--he asks the hotchie-motchie Nathalie Baye, Day for Night's on-screen script girl (most recently seen in Catch Me If You Can), "Did Truffaut like working with actors?" As if she's, a) privy to the answer, and b) going to say "no." (Another five minutes and we no doubt would've found out whether she prefers mustard to ketchup.) In addition to Baye, in the section "La Nuit Americaine: The French Connection" Bouzereau interviews Bernard Menez (Bernard), Dani (Liliane), and Day for Night's editor proper, Yann Dedet, the only one of the four to provide English answers. (Sadly, to questions like: "What is your favourite sequence?") "Day for Night: A Conversation with Jacqueline Bisset" is a pleasant way to spend 9 minutes. Bisset, who remembers the excitement of shooting Day for Night next door to the big-budget James Coburn vehicle The Last of Sheila, is still grateful for the change-of-pace role and notes that she wore a lot of her own clothes in the film. In "Day for Night: An Appreciation" (17 mins.), Columbia University professor Annette Insdorf offers a comment or two on each of the cast members and discusses the significance of Truffaut wearing a hearing-aid as Ferrand, a symbolic gesture (it stressed the isolation a director feels on set) that stemmed from Truffaut's own deafness. Insdorf briefly returns in "Truffaut in the USA" (9 mins.), which also hears from Brian De Palma (offering a rare public glimpse of his sentimental side), Truffaut's Close Encounters of the Third Kind co-star Bob Balaban, and VARIETY critic Todd McCarthy; as a group hug for Truffaut and the film from gifted individuals, it's affecting. Truffaut soundbites from the Cannes Film Festival and the National Society of Film Critics Awards ceremony, both circa Day for Night, plus a list of awards won by Day for Night and the film's trailer cap the platter off.-Bill Chambers Running Time 116 minutes Aspect Ratio(s) 1.85:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced; Languages French Mono, English Mono; CC Yes; Subtitles English, French, Spanish; DVD-9; Region One; Warner

A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like "offbeat" and "quirky" while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of "brilliant" and "incisive." What it is, though, is its own beast--a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments "are," the third is "about") concerning six takes of scene six--the devil's number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into "reality," then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).

Living in Oblivion is dense and hilarious; it forces a non-conventional structure into a three-act theoretical progression, with its main characters essentially re-enacting the creation of a fantasy before ending the film with a series of daydreams indulged during a thirty-second recording of ambient sound (otherwise known as "room tone"). The trickiest part of the film, however, is when the assistant-director in the third segment reveals that something from the dream of the second segment to someone else has, in fact, happened to her in this reality. It occurs that this could be an accidental seepage--before it occurs that it doesn't matter if it's an accident.

All of which is not to say that Living in Oblivion is David Lynch territory--it's too self-aware for that, and too disinterested besides in its visuals despite the peculiar realization that the look of the piece follows Lynch's evolving eye: the grainy aesthetic of Eraserhead in its first segment; the hyper-real Americana of Blue Velvet in its second; and the maddening slipperiness of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in its third and final. Rather, Living in Oblivion is not so much deranged as about derangement--the perverting crucible of creation in which independent filmmakers involve themselves. They're martyrs to their perfidious craft, and the picture is a document of their voluntary crucifixion.

Nick Reve (Steve Buscemi) is an independent film director working on his small picture titled, curiously enough, "Living in Oblivion" (only another layer of extra-text--and not in the expected way), a disastrous production that, from what we can tell, is doomed to be the sort of pretentious claptrap DiCillo's films generally are not--a satire, then, not only of the fluff of Hollywood but also the portentousness of self-conscious indie garbage. To that end, James Le Gros appears as a hilarious Brad Pitt construct (something DiCillo vehemently denies in his commentary) and Catherine Keener plays a B-actress looking for a little recognition.

The success of Living in Oblivion lies in it not falling too far into its concept, avoiding becoming a trick instead of the dissection of process that it is. Its performances excellent and its script sharp, what keeps Living in Oblivion from soaring is that it's too self-consciously artificial, too clearly a product of a man who understands what it is that he's doing--intellectualism drowns out any chance for emotional connection. Produced in a difficult time for DiCillo (that is, between the failure of Johnny Suede and the difficulty of getting Box of Moonlight off the ground), Living in Oblivion reflects a certain cynicism in its execution--and one that reads a little too much like superiority. All the same, the picture is meaty and witty, the sort of product that rewards a closer examination even as it buggers intimacy.

Columbia Tri-Star's DVD release of Living in Oblivion presents the film in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen video transfer that replicates the feel of the triptych film's varying stocks and lighting techniques while distracting with edge-enhancement artifacts. By and large, colour is well-separated and sharp and contrasts are pleasing and fluid. The Dolby 2.0 Surround audio isn't asked to do very much in what is essentially a talk-fest (Jim Farmer's music intrudes occasionally in what I find to be a bad miscalculation on the part of the filmmakers, the scoring of scenes belonging to the film-within-the-film), but dialogue is reproduced faithfully.

A feature-length commentary from director DiCillo finds the arrogant-seeming fellow sharing a few useful tidbits (such as the abovementioned Brad Pitt denial), though the hyphenate is largely given over to rehashing of plot or motive or, almost as bad, overpraise of the admittedly praise-worthy ("Steve is great in this scene!"). A 17-minute interview with DiCillo and Buscemi conducted after a screening of the film at last year's Golden Age of Cinema Film Festival features lively audience participation and serves as a leaner account of Living in Oblivion's production history than DiCillo's yak-track; less interesting is a deleted scene with Le Gros' Chad Palomino that would have been repetitive in context. Trailers for The Big Picture, Love Liza, and Auto Focus round out the disc.-Walter Chaw

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