The Last Metro

Francois Truffaut follows in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville by adapting a popular genre as a serious allegory for the darkest period in French history: the Nazi Occupation. Just as Melville used the gangster film to examine notions of legality, legitimacy, authority and criminality in a period when the Resistance were outlaws and the police rounding up Jews for the death camps, so Truffaut takes the beloved putting-on-a-show warhorse, and uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of life in Occupied France: the need to act, adapt and continually discard roles. When Depardieu's character leaves to fight for the Resistance, he puns about exchanging his make-up (maquillage) for the maquis.

What Truffaut is most interested in, as in all his films, is the effect this need for constant dissembling has on individual identity and relationships. This wonderful romantic comedy plays like a mature update of 'Casablanca', richly stylised, bravely open-ended, with Truffaut's moving camera wrenching spirit from the claustrophobic confines.

In 1942, in a Paris occupied by the Nazis, Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) is a former cinema and presently theater actress, who has also to manage the Montmartre Theater and its company. Her Jewish husband Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), the writer, director and owner of the theater, has officially moved to South America, escaping from the Germans. Indeed he is hidden in the basement of the building. Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) is a promising actor hired to act with Marion in a new play. The survival of the theater depends on the success of this play. Marion falls in love with Bernard, but hides her feelings due to her respect for her husband. Although having a very simple story, this movie is marvelous. The story is a great homage to theatrics, where not only the persons wants to survive, but also desire to save what they love: the theater. I recalled the movie `Il Viaggio di Capitan Fracassa', where theatrics is also honored. It is a love story in times of war. It is a human story, where citizens are presented trying to have a normal life, even having to share their sovereignty and culture with the invaders. It is not corny in any moment. The direction is from one of my favorites directors, François Truffault, who was born in 1932, therefore, he was a ten years old boy when this story begins. Certainly he has had a great experience of life in an occupied country and how life goes on. The beauty and the performance of Catherine Deneuve are astonishing. Gérard Depardieu is in an excellent shape and has also a wonderful performance. Although having 133 min. running time, the film is not long, since the story hooks the attention of the viewer. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): `O Último Metrô' (`The Last Subway Train')

While it's always lovely to see Catherine Deneuve on the big screen, and always nice to hear the lyrical beauty of French in a film, a lazy Sunday afternoon might not have been the best time to have to focus on subtitles. The movie, though heartfelt and lovingly rendered, slowly meandered and wondered in the typical French way of searching for a higher truth about humanity, all of which made for a more sedate movie-going experience than we had hoped.

The Last Metro (1980)

You can see this as a romance, a complicated one filled with restraint and false moves. You can see this as a war movie about resistance and suffering and subterfuge. Or you might see it as a slice of life--never mind the great plot elements--and get a feel for wartime Paris, its oppression under the Nazis and the inability to quite know what to do to survive.

This is layered with a play within a play in a couple ways, and if there is a weakness to the movie it's this inner play. Maybe it's meant to be a bit boring (as the Nazi-sympathizing critic says it is), but it takes up enough of the movie it drags the reality outside of the play down a bit.

Maybe the movie is about accommodation, about bending your highest principles to survive. Or maybe it's about how the smallest of romantic urges are okay to follow through on. Sometimes. Because in the end there is mostly a feeling of having survived. It isn't triumphant, quite, but relieved.

Francois Truffaut is of course not just a famous director but a lionized one, seeming to get credit for lifting cinema into something artistic and valuable, both. All of that is here. The best of this--like feeling leading actress Catherine Deneuve walking the tightrope through people she could not totally trust--is amazing. The filming is subtle and gorgeous, a warm and humanized camera in the hands of Nestor Almendros (famous in the U.S. for "Days of Heaven"). The writing is natural and spare, except for those parts in the interior plays. It is, at its best, a moving beautiful movie.

The structure has an odd breakdown at the end--intentional, with voice-over, but odd nonetheless. It's disruptive not only in time, as intended, but in tone. It forces the viewer to remember this is a fictional invention, an artifice with a cinematic point. And so it is. We see the end with detachment and it's not as rewarding as before.

There's no reason not to see this film. It's different enough to be engaging and yet familiar enough to not be offputting (as some earlier French New Wave directors seem to want). Memorable, at least for a while.

this film is excellent. it's a quiet film where the plot moves slowly, but it doesn't matter. it takes place during the occupation of france of world war II. i don't know how truffaut can do this, he makes films that on paper sound melodramatic and silly, but are feel truly real and sincere without being overly depressing. and this is one of them. i don't know a lot about the german occupation of france during WWII, but its presence is certainly in the film you marion buying an expensive ham under the black market, the blackouts, the talks of hiding in subways and the oppressive and communual presence of the germans. but it's not the focal point of the film. it's about people trying to live normally under stressful situations. their lives are not centered around the war, but around surviving with what they value (their theatre) intact.

it's thoughtful enough to not type-cast its characters based on how they feel about the war and their political positions. a lot of the characters are pragmatic about their situation, such as the director of the play (jean-loup is his name i think) who opposes the germans, but is willing to consider selling the theatre to Daxiat (a powerful pro-german journalist)to save it. all of the crew dislike Daxiat, but treat him with relative respect so that they can keep their theatre running. Daxiat isn't painted as a completely horrible enemy, but was a man who really looked out for the best interests of the theatre company despite the fact that his political views were opposite of those he admired in the theatre company. the people in this film felt real, cuz ideally, we'd all like to think that when faced with oppression from an outside force, we'd be kicking and screaming all the way until we're free of oppression. but in reality, most of us would probably make compromises and do things against our principles to keep what is most important to us (in this case, it's the theatre and its company for the characters here)

in a way, the film reminded me of wong kar wai's in the mood for love in terms of what it does with its characters. it progresses steadily without a lot of major plot points, and it lets you get to know the characters and let them be real, so you never feel bored at how slow things progress. the characters are well written and well acted so that you care deeply about them.

*comments on the ending up ahead*

there is very little that feels staged and over dramatic, and the outcome seems to progress beautifully and quietly. and i don't know what it is about the ending, but i felt strangely uplifted when the credits rolled.