The central character in many of Truffaut's films is a profoundly seductive woman steeped in the archetypal mystery of the belle dame sans merci; she uses her sexual liberation like a femme fatale, to destroy a hero who is either sensitive and needy, or who mistakenly believes that his rationality will enable him to cope with her magic. Truffaut's earliest films present a combination of attraction and hostility in response to this kind of woman. In Les Mistons (1957), a group of boys tease and torment a young woman who is awakening their adolescent desires; they cannot forgive her amorous behavior with her fiancé, who later dies in an accident. In The 400 Blows (1959), the young boy is most vulnerable to his seductive, adulterous mother, who ends up by coldly rejecting him and confining him in an institution. In Soft Skin (1963), even the loving wife and mother finally turns and shoots her unfaithful husband. The femme fatale dominates Jules and Jim (1961), The Bride Wore Black (1968), Mississippi Mermaid (1970), and Such a Gorgeous Kid like Me (1973). All these films reveal the magnetic power of the romantic fantasy, which is held in tension with a deflating comic irony. Though the power of this woman remains unabated throughout these films (in fact, she is completely triumphant in Gorgeous Kid), there is a shift in balance between the romanticism and the irony. After Jules and Jim, though the heroes are still hopelessly drawn into the seductive fantasy, Truffaut does not evoke a parallel reaction in the audience. The femmes fatales are presented with increasing ironic distance and the struggling heroes become more and more absurd. This trend is continued in Day for Night (1973), Truffaut's latest film, where the ridiculous male victim is even more dangerous than the seductive female. As in Gorgeous Kid, their relationship is an object of mockery; but it no longer merits the central focus, for Truffaut at last introduces viable alternatives.

Jules and Jim is unique in its even balance between the two forces and between two views of Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) as the liberating muse and the irresponsible tyrant. This combination gives her omnipotence over the lives of Jules (Oskar Werner), the delicate German whose rationality leads him to study entomology, and Jim (Henri Serre), the tall, dark Frenchman who develops into the sensitive writer-adventurer. After tormenting the two of them with her changes of heart, she plunges her car off the end of a bridge in a fit of pique, taking Jim along for the fatal ride. Jules, though astonished, is basically relieved. Hitchcock provides the conventions and tone for The Bride Wore Black, where Truffaut moves further into irony, focusing on the aesthetics rather than the ethics of murder. Julie (again played by Jeanne Moreau) kills with style and verve, suiting the seduction and the modus operandi to each victim's tastes. As the "wronged woman" whose bridegroom was accidentally shot on the church steps by a group of men cleaning a gun, Julie is romantically justified in her vengeful hunt (one of her victims paints her as Diana, conveniently providing bow and arrow). When she is finally arrested, the only man left unmurdered is the one who actually fired the shot; however, she takes care of him in prison with a carving knife. Though she ends up behind bars, no one has escaped her power and, in her own terms and those of the film, she's a smashing success. In Mississippi Mermaid, the romance is provided by Catherine Deneuve's exquisite person, her clothes, and the exotic settings. Her appearance—in flowing white, and carrying a birdcage—delights the lonely plantation owner (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who has acquired his bride by mail. Later he learns that not only is she an impostor, but, in cahoots with her ruthless lover, she has murdered the real bride. Yet love conquers all, bringing forgiveness from her husband, who is moved to aid her in another murder. His continuing adoration becomes profoundly absurd as this divine Julie tries several times to murder him. Finally, he succeeds in being alone with his beloved in a mountain retreat—which she transforms into a deadly trap. In Gorgeous Kid, the audience is not for one moment allowed to share the romantic illusion of Stanislas Previn (André Dassolier), who longs to see the vulgar and utterly selfish Camilla Bliss (Bernadette Lafont) as a helpless but redeemable victim of a nasty childhood, and as a great artiste on her way to stardom. While she has the sexual energy and comic resilience of a Moll Flanders, the sociologist hero, to his ruination, forgets that she is a potent maneater who began precociously by killing daddy. After heroically proving her innocence for the one murder she didn't commit, this poignant fool winds up in jail, betrayed into taking the rap for her latest killing. In Day for Night, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a babyish movie star, is jilted by a scriptgirl named Liliane (played by Dani) who runs away with a stuntman in the middle of the shooting schedule. Although she is deceitful, irresponsible, and self-centered, Liliane is not a killer. Her actions, words, and clothes (she wears a T-shirt that labels her as a "Wild Thing") all clearly indicate that she is not the marrying kind. Early in the film she warns Alphonse, "It's stupid to be jealous, or else go all the way and commit murder." Yet, he constantly clutches at her snatch, insisting, "That's mine, keep it for me, in sacred trust." Her reasons for not wanting to marry him are sound: "He's a spoiled brat who won't grow up. He needs a wife, a mistress, a wet nurse, and a maid…. He wants the whole world to pay for his unhappy childhood." When she leaves him, he sulks like a baby and wallows in his misery. Clearly he loves to be the victim and chooses his women accordingly: "My affairs have always ended badly. I thought women were magic." His indulgent masochism makes him dangerous: he petulantly holds up the movie and tries to destroy the marriage of the woman who comforts him. While confirming this pattern, his role within the inner movie takes him all the way. He plays the young husband whose wife falls in love with his father; in the end, he shoots his father in the back.

In all of these films, a second important contrast is created between willfulness and accident. The films move toward a more skeptical view of chance, implying a rejection of the romantic view of lives shaped by fate. Prepared for their kismet by having seen the stone sculpture of the "eternal female," Jules and Jim meet Catherine and recognize the face; inevitably she becomes their muse, the feminine force destined to shape their lives. The film is full of chance meetings, especially the one where the three are joyfully reunited after finding each other in a movie theater. Catherine insists that the future of her relationship with Jim be determined by whether he succeeds in getting her pregnant. Although Catherine feels she can transform chance into a kind of creative spontaneity (as when she jumps into the Seine, electrifying the complacent men), this quality is revealed as a destructive willfulness, fully realized in the impromptu suicide. The Bride Wore Black focuses on a series of deliberate murders, framed by two accidents—the shooting of the bridegroom, which triggers the plot, and the final coincidence that brings hunter and hunted into the same jail. Yet, the single-minded determination of Julie's revenge somehow denies that her husband's death was accidental, and her extraordinary prowess suggests that the bizarre final encounter is also exactly as she planned it. As in these two films (as well as Shoot the Piano Player and Two English Girls, both of which open with comic accidents), the events of Mississippi Mermaid are launched by the fortuitous shipboard meeting of the mail-order bride and the pair of killers. While pursuing Julie, the husband just happens to see her on TV.

Yet these accidents are overshadowed by the elaborately evil plotting of Julie and her lover, and the apparently willful masochism of the husband. Such a Gorgeous Kid places even stronger emphasis on the dangerous machinations of the killer, in contrast to the self-destructiveness of her victim. Camilla rationalizes her murders by calling them "fate bets" (e.g., take away daddy's ladder—will he notice or not?). In the 2-to-1 fate bet where she tries to exterminate husband and lover, she hears Fate whispering: "On your way, sister. Get the lead out and move!" Comic repetition reveals that this attitude is completely self-serving, allowing her to evade responsibility for her action. Similarly, Arthur, the puritanical exterminator, uses chance to rationalize his sexual transgressions; every time he and Camilla have sex, they must re-enact the accident that first brought them together. But on that occasion (as in most of her sexual exploits), Camilla is willing to take credit for her performance: "Fate was doing her part and I reckoned I must do mine." The sociologist, on the other hand, tries to exonerate her for both sex and murder. He uses clichés of love and psychosocial causality to ignore the blatant facts and deny Camilla's responsibility; finally, this attitude blinds him to what the audience clearly sees—that sooner or later she will do him in. From a romantic perspective, la belle dame in each of these films could be seen as the embodiment of Fate for her male victim. But Truffaut seems to move toward a psychological inevitability implicit in Jules and Jim and blatant in Gorgeous Kid and Day for Night; the selfish woman will manage to find a man who likes to suffer, and vice versa. In Day for Night the conflict between willfulness and accident is placed in the context of art. The director of the film (played by Truffaut) struggles against countless unforeseen circumstances in the attempt to shape and control his movie: the personal lives of the actors and crew keep intruding—marital problems, love spats, pregnancy, a dying son and mother. Finally, one of the stars (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is killed in an automobile accident, forcing the director to change the ending. At first he sets out to make a great work of art; but as the problems mount and he is pressured by time, finances, and people, his aspirations grow more modest—he hopes only to finish the film. Yet as we watch the process, we see that Truffaut knows how to take advantage of the accidents. As the players meet their crises, he incorporates their feelings and their dialogue into his script, enriching the meaning and value of his film. As an artist, he must develop a balance between control and spontaneity.

Truffaut carefully controls settings and environment to create the tone and particular interplay between romance and irony unique to each film. In Jules and Jim, the vulnerability of the young men is linked to the nostalgic setting where they formed their friendship—Bohemian Paris with its narrow stairways, miniature courtyards, picturesque streets and café's. In the country, the romance is emphasized by the impressionistic visuals; sunny settings and sweeping long shots create a dream-like quality. The freeze shot is used to capture fleeting moments. The World War I footage and the Nazi book burnings of the late thirties provide a sharp contrast, reminding us that the romantic dream can lead to its own destruction. In The Bride Wore Black, each set is a test for Julie. She must select the appropriate costume and personality to dominate whatever scene she enters. At a swank cocktail party, she is dazzling in white. Going low-profile in a school teacher costume, she takes over the suburban household of her third victim, locking him in a narrow cupboard to suffocate. Her reclining portrait totally dominates the studio of the artist (victim #4); proud of her portrait (and her other accomplishments) she leaves it intact, which leads to her arrest. Mississippi Mermaid presents a series of extremely romantic settings: the lush vegetation and intense sunlight of the Reunion Islands; the charming old French house in the country; the decayed Antibes night club; the isolated mountain cabin. These environments provide a dreamy or exotic surface behind which the scheming, the sordid, and the deadly are played out.

The opening visuals of Gorgeous Kid immediately contrast the worlds of Camilla and Stanislas. Behind the titles, color-filtered negative images rush by to light, bouncy music, evoking Camilla's superficial gaiety. Then suddenly, the film cuts to an image of a shelf of books and a quiet sound track, evoking the traditional humanism of the sociologist. The contrast is further developed through the two groups of sets. Scenes involving Stanislas take place in the musty confinement of an empty courtroom within the barred prison, or in his small, crowded office. In both locales, the camera frequently focuses on his tape-recorder, emphasizing the sociological investigation. Instead of soft visuals evoking romance, as in Jules and Jim and Mississippi Mermaid, the detailed realism of Gorgeous Kid invites irony. Camilla's life (developed largely through flashbacks) also takes place in the world of everyday reality, but with much greater color and variety. The first house she encounters is messy and crowded, and the lower portion is full of large, dangerous machines; later she chooses a rat-infested gothic castle for the scene of her double murder attempt. Other important sets present tawdry, sleazy version of the conventionally glamorous world of show biz: Sam Golden's night club (this third-rate European parody of an American rock star is immortalized in a huge billboard); ugly, crowded dressing rooms; back-stage scenes with dancers grotesquely wigged and made up. When she escapes from prison and is running away from the high, grey walls, the camera suddenly pulls back, revealing her in the middle of a huge, utterly empty field, implying that her freedom will be as desolate as her confinement. This shot evokes the final image in 400 Blows where, after the boy has fled from prison, the camera reveals him standing at bay; but the sea behind him is more romantic, more fruitful than this barren landscape. Gorgeous Kid is also full of symbols used with irony: the innocent white lamb that crosses little Camilla's path after she has finished off daddy; the neon sign of future promise that appears over her husband's shoulder as she is about to abandon him; the flexible piping wielded by her exterminator lover. Truffaut leads us to scorn both these heavy-handed symbols and our impulse toward psychologizing when Stanislas responds to Camilla's desire for a banjo as sublimated penis envy.

This spirit of parody extends to the whole process of sociological investigation. Frequently Truffaut offers glaring comic contradictions between the visual flashbacks and Camilla's account of her life (so carefully preserved on tape) as in the patricide where she innocently asks, "How could I know my father was up there?" or her "dignified" reaction to her husband's violence, when she claims she acted like the Queen of England, but in the flashback she screams, "You crummy motherfucker!" But Stanislas never learns the truth of the flashbacks, and even flees to avoid the corroborating evidence of the prison guard from Camilla's home town, who smacks his lips over her early sexual exploits. The film's typical shot is a zoom in to the face of a character, but this investigative technique is unrevealing. As the lawyer begins to seduce Camilla, the camera pulls in for a tight close-up of his earnest, smitten face. Only much later do we learn the extent of his exploitive corruption.

In many ways, Gorgeous Kid is the farcical flip-side of The Wild Child. Both films focus on scientific investigation, but treat it very differently. In the earlier film, the highly contrived, elegant, spare interiors emphasize the positive, humanistic values of rational inquiry, and the woodland exteriors are beautiful in their moon-lit mystery. Both films present an encounter between two people possessing entirely different bodies of knowledge—the civilized and the wild. The Wild Child focuses on what the nature boy has to sacrifice in order to acquire the benefits of civilization, thereby stressing the values of both worlds (and developing a tragic vision, since both choices involve loss). But the darkly comic Gorgeous Kid emphasizes the inadequacies of both worlds; the professor's civilized naivete does not protect him from Camilla the predator. As she tells him, when they've reversed positions around the prison bars: "Jail's funny. There's them that know and those that don't. So now you know, like me." On the other hand, Camilla's wild days are ruthless and homicidal; in a world like hers, no one would be safe.

In Day for Night the wildness and humanism are combined in the world of movies. As in Gorgeous Kid, show biz is a zany world full of tantrums and sexual antics. The jealous wife of the production manager shrieks at the big shots, "Your movie world, I think it slinks." Both stars proclaim that it's "a rotten life" and decide to quit movies for good. But we don't believe them—partly because the film stresses, in contrast to the wildness of their private lives, the great vitality and satisfaction in the creative effort. Practically everyone on the crew works hard from early in the morning to late at night. Instead of focusing on the glamour of the movie sets, Truffaut treats them with romantic irony. We go behind the scenes and see in action the cranes, weather machines, cameras, trick candles, and prompter cards, and then the camera moves in, hiding the equipment and emphasizing the illusions it can create. This comic breakdown of illusion not only deflates the sentiment (as we watch them shoot the climactic kitchen scene through a window streaked with phony rain, Truffaut shouts, "Remember, no sentimentality in this scene"), but also wins our admiration for the ingenuity and wit of the operation. After hearing that Liliane has run off with the stunt man, Joelle (who has just enjoyed a quickie with one of the crewmen who happened to help her change a flat tire) quips: "I'd drop a guy for a film. I'd never drop a film for a guy." Like Truffaut, she knows not only how to take advantage of fortuitous accidents, but also where the real satisfactions of show business lie. At the peak of Alphonse's absurdity, he steps into the hotel corridor in his nightshirt and poutingly declares to Truffaut: "I need money to go to a whorehouse." Instead, Truffaut gives him some good advice: "People like you and me are happy only in our work." As in Wild Child and Gorgeous Kid, we again see images of books in the hands of a civilized man; but instead of a scientist, this time it is Truffaut, the film-maker, exploring his roots in the works of Buñuel, Godard, Welles, Hitchcock, Bergman, Bresson, Rossellini, and Dreyer, with whom he helps to form an impressive cinematic tradition. Day for Night is Truffaut's 8 1/2, his Contempt, his Immortal Story, his Discreet Charm, his Passion of Anna, and he explicitly places his work in the proper context, dedicating it to the Gish girls. The recurring dream sequences suggest that he has civilized his own "wild child" through his art. At first we see an anxious child with a cane running down a dark, deserted street (reminiscent of the opening in Shoot the Piano Player); in the next version the child is impeded by an iron gate (evoking images from 400 Blows and Wild Child); but in the final dream sequence we discover that the gate is guarding a movie theater, which the boy successfully invades in order to rip off promotional stills from Citizen Kane, the masterpiece of a precocious genius.

In Truffaut's films, the basic polarities are developed along sexual lines: the men rely on will, civilization, and reason; the women are the wild, natural creatures who rely on chance. But paradoxically, the rational men are more susceptible to fantasy, and the women, who are the romantic objects, are more capable of cynical irony. The primary problem for most of Truffaut's men is that they never quite grow out of adolescence. Growing up is the main theme of Les Mistons and the autobiographical series, in which Jean-Pierre Léaud grows up in real time. His vulnerable sensitivity and his need for love are most sympathetic in 400 Blows because he is a child who cannot be expected to deal with the selfishness and corruption of the world around him. As we watch him age in Love at Twenty and Stolen Kisses, he is clearly trapped in adolescent yearning. In Bed and Board, now married, he tries to live out his fantasy in an affair with an Oriental woman, but returns to wife and child. Actually, he is drawn to her parents, suggesting that his conception of maturity is a comfortable, static, bourgeois existence. In Two English Girls, Léaud provides an alternative to these films; though he still bears an autobiographical connection with Truffaut (being the author of a novel about two men in love with the same woman), he portrays a different character. The darling of an over-protective momma, responsive to every woman he encounters, he moves back and forth between burning passion and cool detachment. His feelings become the subject matter for his art, but his personal growth is stunted. Leaud is least sympathetic in Day for Night as the totally self-indulgent baby, who at one point retreats to carnival dodg'em cars as a means of expressing his frustration. In Shoot the Piano Player all the men are dangerous babies including Charlie, who manages to commit murder without dropping the role of kid brother. Truffaut seems to identify strongly with the child, which may be the source of his extraordinary skill with child actors. In Gorgeous Kid he mocks himself through the baby film-maker, whose unedited footage (which he is at first unwilling to release) documents Camilla's only innocence. The precocious film buff is treated more seriously through the dream sequences in Day for Night, where he is identified with the mature film-maker. (In one transition, the dream gate becomes the entrance to the film studio.) No matter what their age or experience, Truffaut's men are always capable of losing themselves in an adolescent passion that proves to be their downfall. In fact the only grown-up men in Truffaut's films are Dr. Itard in The Wild Child and the director in Day for Night—the only roles played by Truffaut himself. In The Wild Child, the boy is externalized and becomes a foil for the rational humanist. Truffaut abandons sexual romance, and confronts directly the conflict between the wild and the civilized, the child and the adult. This dualism is rendered more personal in Day for Night, which combines the autobiographical films with the others. Truffaut's two sides are separated and exaggerated: Léaud plays the ridiculous adolescent while Truffaut himself is the mature authority figure.

In developing his female characters, Truffaut has usually focused on the threat posed by women who try to break through social conventions and live out their own desires. Until Day for Night Truffaut was unable to explore this aspiration without focusing on destruction. In his earlier films, as he moved from Jules and Jim to Gorgeous Kid, his attitude grew increasingly negative. This pattern is reflected in the women's names. In Jules and Jim, Catherine, who identifies with Napoleon, is linked by her name with the Empress of Russia, one of the greatest female tyrants of all time. Through her resemblance to the stone carving, Catherine is also infused with a timeless, mythic, female power that can manifest itself in any age or nation. In The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, the woman is called Julie, evoking Strindberg's play Miss Julie—which moved Catherine to jump into the Seine in protest; its freedom-loving heroine is, of course, destructive to men. The women in the later films no longer possess Catherine's mystic force; their power comes from either diabolical cleverness or ethereal beauty, In Gorgeous Kid, the heroine has sunk from empress to whore. Her combination of names—Camilla Bliss—evokes not Garbo's languid lady, but a comic sexuality, which is exactly the source of her power. Camilla's dreadful performances with banjo and song are grotesque in comparison with Catherine's charming little performance with guitar and lover in Jules and Jim. Camilla as siren could lure only the deaf, but the people seem to love it.

In relationship to other women, Catherine is polarized with Gilberte, Jim's patient girlfriend, who is clearly no match for the heroine. The promiscuous young girl who smokes like a choochoo train deflates the seriousness with which Catherine takes her own adventures. But in Gorgeous Kid, only other women can see through Camilla. At first, Clovis's mother seems like a worthy opponent, but she is ultimately done in by Camilla's death trap. Sam Golden's explosive wife, however, kicks Camilla out of her husband's bed, and later tricks her with the corrupt lawyer. The prison matron can control Camilla, but only with institutional paraphernalia. Camilla is polarized with the mousey secretary who, though helpless, is able to see right through her. After their first encounter, she calls her a slut, and constantly tries to tell Stanislas what she really is—a tramp, a whore, a nymphomaniac. Far more accurate than the scientist, she predicts, "I bet she even raped the exterminator," and tries to convince him: "She's not a victim. She's a menace." But like Gilberte, she can only sit and wait.

These femmes fatales have in common a profound selfishness and irresponsibility, which make them a menace to everyone, especially men. The question arises, then, is it possible in Truffaut's vision for a woman to exercise seductive power and break out of conventional limitations without becoming a wild killer? If a basically "nice girl" transgresses sexual lines, either through self-sacrifice (like the wife in Shoot the Piano Player who goes to bed with a man to help her husband's career), or through a deliberate attempt to gain freedom (like the artistic sister in Two English Girls), she may have to pay with her life. And even nice girls are capable of being bitchy. In Shoot the Piano Player, the hyper-sensitive Charlie is horrified by the way Lena torments her lecherous boss. She helps to provoke the fight in which Charlie unwillingly kills him. Yet, like his wife who committed suicide, Lena is the one who is accidentally killed; again Charlie is the sensitive survivor.

There are, however, some exceptions. Truffaut's first positive unconventional heroine is the teacher (Julie Christie) in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), a film that stands outside both lines of Truffaut's work. She succeeds in luring the book-burning hero (Oskar Werner) away from a dehumanizing, repressive society. But her rebellion serves a return to books, Truffaut's favorite symbol of traditional humanism. Not until Day for Night do we find a heroine (played by Jacqueline Bisset) who really takes an important step forward. At first, we suspect she's going to be another siren. Her name is Julie, and that usually means trouble in a Truffaut movie. She is a famous movie star who, after a serious "breakdown," married her doctor. Thus, when we see her interviewed by reporters, we expect her to conform to the stereotype of the neurotic, childlike sex symbol (epitomized by Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita). But instead she turns out to be a strong, independent, mature woman who works hard and well as a professional actress. Unlike other Truffaut heroines, she is noncompetitive and friendly with other women. Even though she is critical of Liliane's abrupt departure, Julie defends her to Alphonse and perceptively predicts that she will become the victim in her relationship with the stunt man. Julie's one mistake is sleeping with baby Alphonse—to keep him from falling apart or leaving before the film is completed. It may be adultery, but it's also team spirit. Her value system conforms to that of Truffaut and the costume girl—work and humanism above bourgeois mortality. But naughty little Alphonse responds to this mercy-fucking by calling her husband next morning to say: "I love your wife. I slept with her. Set her free." In this crisis, Julie suffers pain and guilt, for her older husband had left his wife and children in order to devote himself to her and to "make her into a responsible adult." Apparently he has succeeded, for Julie is able to cope with the situation, continue her work without holding up production, and even be forgiving and sympathetic with poor Alphonse. When her husband offers her a pill to calm down her nerves, which she tries to refuse, we begin to suspect that she really doesn't need him anymore; she seems to take it to reassure him of her dependency. Yet her generous spirit may again be somewhat self-defeating, for she has already told Truffaut that she's decided to live alone and he has quickly incorporated this decision as the right ending for his script. In the film within the film, she plays a young English girl who rejects her young husband (played by Alphonse) when she falls in love with his father (played by Alexander, the actor who dies in the car crash). She decides to leave them both; the deaths of her elderly lover in the film and the actor who plays the role suggest that in her own private life she may, indeed, live out this independence. The name of the inner film is Meet Pamela, which may evoke the 18th-century English novel Pamela (just as Two English Girls brought to mind the Bronte sisters, as several critics have suggested); in Richardson's novel, as in Truffaut's Day for Night, we meet a new kind of heroine.

In the earlier films dominated by femmes fatales, these lethal women seem to represent not womankind but a romantic individualism that is both seductive and dangerous. This vision is powerful because it encourages the individual to live out pure instinct and overcome limitations imposed by civilization. But what if the instincts are flawed? What if sublime intensity (through love and art) is also an invitation to violent death? These issues are developed most explicitly in Jules and Jim, but they are of central concern even in the farcical Gorgeous Kid where the habits of love are subtly linked with war. The film ends with the secretary sitting at the typewriter, sweetly waiting for her lover to emerge from prison, while the sound track offers the strains of "J'Attendrai," the famous French waiting song of World War II. In the midst of the melodramatic scramble to save the "innocent" Camilla, the camera gives us close-ups of Kodak kittens and puppies, reminding us how easily we can be manipulated by art. Truffaut pursues this mockery in Day for Night where the crew struggles to get a shot of an adorable fluffy kitten lapping up milk in a love scene. (Finally, they are forced to bring the scrawny studio cat as a stand-in.) Even on the set, no one can resist the helpless and adorable. If we are foolish like Stanislas, this is how we will react to Camilla. The power of art is further undermined when we meet the baby auteur who comes up with redeeming evidence. Camilla abdicates responsibility for her own acts and her betrayal of Stanislas in the name of art: her "sufferings" have made her an artiste, she claims, and Stanislas (if he survives) will be able to write the great novel.

Day for Night holds a very important position in Truffaut's canon. As content, the filmmaking process becomes his vehicle for expressing kindness, wit, and wisdom, the values which must tame the wild. The film functions as a reaffirmation of art, allowing the full realization of Trnffaut's powers that were present in his finest films—Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and The Wild Child. It also succeeds in integrating the autobiographical films with the others and striking a balance between wildness and humanism, chance and willfulness. This development is also reflected in his treatment of men and women. Both Truffaut the director and Julie the actress are successful professional artists and responsible adults whose generous social virtues transcend the romantic illusion and selfish cruelty so pervasive in the earlier films.