One of the propelling impulses still is the need to make ordered and comprehensible a world that is disordered and incomprehensible. It's not the only impulse but it is an important one, and it has always seemed to me that one of the most moving aspects of the work of any artist is this ability to continue to function when, deep down, he must suspect an ultimate futility.

This suspicion is apparent throughout the best work of François Truffaut…. It's not the final disposition of things that is important, Truffaut's films keep saying, but the adventures and the risks en route, the mad and often doomed challenges that are accepted in living….

[Day for Night] is Truffaut's love letter to people who, for one reason or another, choose to live their lives halfway between reality and illusion. It's the highly comic and affecting chronicle of the members of a movie crew who gather at the Victorine Studios in Nice to make what looks to be (at least, from the bits we see of it) a sudsy romantic melodrama about a young wife who falls tragically in love with her father-in-law.

On its surface, Day for Night is a very inside movie, decorated with references to dozens of movies and moviemakers, packed with behind-the-scenes information about how movies are made…. (p. 1)

In Day for Night, Truffaut is emulating two earlier artists he admires a great deal, Balzac and Hawks, each of whom in his own way was fascinated by the details of a profession which, in turn, could express the essence of a character. If Day for Night were simply about how movies are made, however, it would be no more than a pleasantly frivolous film, charming in its details, perhaps, but as easily forgotten as a successful soufflé. It is, I think, a great deal more than that, since this profession, which Truffaut happens to know best, also happens to be an almost perfect metaphor for life as Truffaut seems to see it in his films.

Beautifully expressing one of the essential thoughts of the film is a line spoken by Severine …, a once-popular Hollywood actress who has returned to Europe to live and to play roles like that of the middle-aged mother in "Meet Pamela," which is the title of the film-within-the-film. After a party celebrating her last day of shooting, Severine says of moviemaking: "As soon as we grasp things, they're gone."…

For all of its inside details, Day for Night seems to me to be less about moviemaking than about a way of facing the conundrum of human existence. A candle may turn out to be fake, life-long friendships may simply be temporary alliances, and what seems to be love may only be infatuation or simply a cheering gift, a one-night stand. Art may be actual experience, ransacked and reformed. This awareness, however, need not diminish the quality of the experience or art. It can, in fact, enhance it. To deprecate it is to deprecate the grand possibilities of life itself. (p. 31)