And It's Oscar Season Again...

I guess since the Oscar nominees were announced just a few days ago, it is officially the Awards season. While the Academy Awards has very little allure for me anymore, it once did. And, if anything, it gives us an excuse to become reacquainted with the many films that reaped rewards of critical love and affection since Wings picked up the very first statuette in 1929. I have been starting and stopping for the last couple days this week on Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), so I consider it my first real opening film for the Oscar season, but I did get a chance to catch The Graduate (1968) Thursday evening. It has been a few years since I last watched The Graduate. While I’m not personally all that crazy for the film or Hoffman’s character I realize its significance in regards to how the generations truly aren’t in touch with each other. Hoffman’s Ben Braddock graduates from college and hasn’t a clue what to do with himself. He capitalizes on his parents’ friend’s wife’s longing for sexual companionship, eventually involved in an affair which includes many nights at a particular hotel (they spend so much time there, the staff greet him by different names as if he were a frequent visitor!). Ben’s naiveté and Mrs. Robinson’s (Anne Bancroft) voluntary susceptibility to repeated nights of sex with a younger man (she tells Ben she sleeps in a different room than Murray Hamilton’s Mr. Robinson) eventually incurs disastrous repercussions. Particularly when the Robinsons’ daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), returns from Berkley and Ben’s parents (Williams Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson) encourage him to ask her out on a date and she accepts. Mrs. Robinson insists Ben does not continue to date Elaine but they hit it off and he can’t help himself.  It is just hard for me to sympathize with Ben when he has successfully avoided sexual relations with Mrs. Robinson, but decides (since she tried to seduce him and was more than willing to get down and dirty right in her daughter’s bedroom!) to call her up anyway. What happens after this is of his own volition. I thought a film focused more on Mrs. Robinson instead of Ben’s pursuit of a ditsy Elaine could have been quite interesting. I especially liked one scene where Ben does seem engaged in trying to get to know Mrs. Robinson, and she attempts to avoid any significant dialogue. But you can see in her face she is uncertain if this exchange has merit, kind of relenting under pressure to answer a few of his questions (all the while trying to cut out the lights and get back to sex). This is really as close as we are allowed to penetrate the layer, quite thick, Mrs. Robinson secures herself behind. She’s feisty, aggressive, assertive, and quite sure-footed in what she wants. When Ben cuts into her over being a drunk after she forbids him to see her daughter, Mrs. Robinson takes it, steeling her resolve when many others might fall to pieces. But I think Bancroft’s sexiest moment is when she surprises Ben during a rainy day, once again telling him to chill out regarding his pursuing Elaine, completely drenched, sans the makeup. The nonsense with Ben going to Berkley to be near Elaine after telling her about the affair with her mother, eventually winning back her heart did nothing for me at all. In fact the meat of the film (besides the melodic Simon and Garfunkel songs) is that discovered love for Elaine after one date and subsequent service towards building a relationship despite Mrs. Robinson’s warnings not to do so. Elaine just forgiving Ben and mulling over marrying him or a doctor’s son is supposed to be a quirky development I guess. Just the same, “Plastics”. I think that was sound capitalist advice, even if I’m not sure Ben will take heed to it. The bus ride at the end as the young lovers take stock in what breaking up the wedding ceremony, fighting off the two families, and taking off together speaks volumes: giddy folly turns to “Oh, shit”.
*** / *****

During the holiday season of 2017, I revisited Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, so I guess it was only fitting I finally had the opportunity to watch his delightful Day for Night during the Oscar season of winter.  It took me three evenings to finish the film, but not because of it being a chore. Quite the opposite, I wanted to prolong the experience over a few evenings because I didn’t want it to end. It is just so alive, busy, and definitely never boring. There is just so much going on in the “film within the film” and that love for cinema echoes all the way through. In dialogue, through books on directors, pictures on the wall, a dream about a child walking towards a place, later to be revealed the theater during a showing of Citizen Kane, and just conversations in passing between members of the crew (even a cool nod to Bullitt (1968)); each passing nod to the masters and the films made by them is like a little pleasure every time Truffaut does it. But just the travails that often inundate poor Truffaut as he juggles dramas on set, sexual escapades that lead to departures and angst, take after take due to technical problems and performance errors (poor Séverine stumbles over some lines and continues to open the wrong door to a closet instead of exit!), script rewrites and changes due to unforeseen problems (pregnant actress, death of a major cast member (Alexandre dies in a car wreck and Truffaut’s director Ferrand must work around his absence somehow), time constraints for imported star, Bisset, etc.), and crew and staff constantly needing his approval on filmmaking matters. I just loved Day for Night (the process used in Hollywood filmmaking where night scenes are shot during the day using filters) for its encapsulation of the filmmaking process and production schedule activity, detailed and painstakingly captured, hardly taking a breath and intimately involved with all taking part, from the cast of the film about a family torn apart by an affair between a son’s love and his father (Pamela and Alexadnre) to the script girl serving as Ferrand’s right arm. The young man, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud, a frequent collaborator with Truffaut), playing the son who shoots his father over anger and jealousy regarding the affair with his young wife (Bisset, as Pamela), contends with a girlfriend with a wandering eye who eventually leaves him for an English stuntman. When Julie Baker (Bisset’s lead actress’ name) feels bad for Alphonse, sleeping with him, it causes some unneeded stress later rectified when her husband comes to the set to comfort her (instead of scold her). Just a lot of that sort of thing on film sets. I thought it was all quite compelling and exciting to watch, giving civilians a look behind the curtain at all the harried action and creative process where making a film requires overcoming  constant obstacles and dodging distractions that might hinder it all. I could talk about it more, but I will preserve that for a later date. ***** / *****