Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Louis Richard
Starring: Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean Champion, Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut
Running Time: 116 minutes
Genre: Comedy, drama
In the balmy South of France, a film crew are working on a trashy, romantic melodrama called Meet Pamela. As the cast and crew negotiate romantic entanglements, various personal and professional crisis, the dedicated but increasingly harried director (Truffaut) is just determined to get the film finished.
François Truffaut was one of the cinema's great directors, and this is one of his finest, and most purely joyful films, a celebration of film and film-making. The film features Truffaut's regular alter-ego Jean-Pierre Léaud as the sulky, neurotic leading man who has an affair with brittle, British star Jacqueline Bisset, while Valentina Cortese plays a formidable Italian diva, who has a past relationship with the ageing Lothario Jean-Pierre Aumont cast opposite her, and Truffaut himself plays Meet Pamela's put-upon director. The celebrated author Graham Greene has a cameo as an insurance agent, credited as "Harry Graham". Everyone seems to be having a great time in their roles, and the film, which opens with a dedication to Lillian and Dorthy Gish, two great stars of the silent screen, is full of references to films and filmmakers. The story focuses just as much attention on the nuts and bolts of making a film, as it does on the interweaving stories of the actors and crew. The film-makers have to deal with lack of time and money, journalists, investors, costumes, sets, even a seemingly simple shot of a cat drinking from a saucer of milk takes forever to put on film, and the film's most expensive and elaborate scene is destroyed due to an accident in the development lab. The film is at times, surprisingly dark and has moments of real emotion, but the mood, predominantly, is one of joyful celebration, and crucially is very funny.
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