Paris, 1942. The city is under German occupation. Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), the Jewish Director of the Theatre Montmartre, has gone into hiding, it’s rumored he’s left France. Since his disappearance, his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve), the star of the ensemble, has been running the theatre. Only she knows that Lucas is actually hiding in the cellar of the building, where a hole in the heating-pipes allows him to listen in on rehearsals. The play, “La Disparue”... Marion’s task is made more difficult by the fact that Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), a critic who collaborates with the Nazis, is particularly interested in her theatre, and she is thus forced to run a very tight ship. The strictness of her regime is also felt by Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu), a talented you actor and notorious ladies’ man. Through he’s rehearsing the male lead at Marion’s side, her interest in him seems purely professional.
For many years,
Francois Truffaut had wanted to make a film about his memories of the Occupation. In
The Last Metro, he combines this with a second ambition: to make a film set in a theatre. For the one-time leader of the French Nouvelle Vague, it was an unusual project and, above all, a risky one.
The Last Metro was Truffaut’s most expensive film. As he hadn’t had a box-office success for years, a flop this time might well have jeopardized his independence. Yet despite the stars in the cast, there was no way of knowing whether the public would like the film. At that time, there had been little serious examination of the period of occupation in France. The few films that broached the topic were either burlesques or heroic epics. But Truffaut wanted to show everyday life in Paris alone. It received ten Césars, was nominated for an Oscar, and the critics were-almost-unanimous in their praise.
The Last Metro is almost classical in appearance. It was sot mainly in the grounds of an old factory, and this gives it a kind of “Studio Finish” unusual for Truffaut. Nonetheless, the film radiates vitality and authenticity. For one thing, enormous care was expended on getting the smallest details right, on everything from the music of the day to the radio programs of the time. Above all, despite the presence of two big stars, it is a wonderful ensemble film. It’s full of utterly believable characters, whose function is the plot arises naturally from their role in the theatre, and who give us an impression of the varied reactions of Parisians to everyday life under foreign occupation.
Truffaut shows us neither mere normality nor a permanent state of emergency. Instead, he presents a complex and detailed portrait of the time, with all the fine gradations between resistance and collaboration.
The film functions equally well as a dramatic love story set against a background of historical events; but typically, there’s nothing stereotyped about Truffaut’s use of this well-tired pattern. In his hands, it becomes a free spirited and intimate study of a painful love triangle. As the film draws to a close, Deneuve, Depardieu and Bennent appear on stage – hand in hand. Here, Truffaut is true to himself, and no closer to conventional morality than he was when he made Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1961). The heart of this film is Catherine Deneuve, a woman torn between two men. This was her second collaboration with Truffaut, after Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirene du Mississippi, 1969). Now, in 1979, in the play-within-the-film, Truffaut asked her and Depardieu to repeat the wonderful closing dialog from the earlier move. The Last Metro, then, is also a homage to the actress Deneuve, one of the great lovers in cinema history.
