Le Dernier Métro

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.

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')

Le Dernier Metro is the portrait of a woman. An ageing, beautiful, authoritative, successful and famous actress caught in her own personal quagmire, and that of a strange historical era.

It's 1942 and Paris screams under the German occupation. A quiet scream, at least as portrayed by Truffaut, where Parisiens go on living their everyday lives as close to normal as they can. The German element is of course ubiquitous, always lurking in the shadow of normality like an undiagnosed disease. The black market, the Jewish persecution, the curfew, the collaboration and the resistance, all are accepted as just another fact of life.

The real threat though is the unknown. What will the war bring? How longer will it last? And yet, decency and normality go on being the bourgeois lifestyle of choice, simply because most don't know how to really survive without the city, without its theaters and fashion circles. Without this superficial normality.

In the middle of this strangeness stands a woman disillusioned by her life. Deep inside, this poignantly beautiful, famous, smart and strong woman is empty. Torn between her professional and artistic duties that have increased dramatically since her Jew husband and theater chef fled to save his life, and her ageing femininity and her devoid of passion life, she revolves around the sole remaining centrepiece of her life, acting. Only acting proves to be just another lifeless remain of her previous life.

Should she stay faithful to a husband that she stopped loving a long time ago? Do they both cling on to their failing relationship just for the sake of normality, to survive this strangeness of an era? Will tomorrow ever come, and if it comes will she be too old to enjoy it? Deneuve is perfection. The script has most probably been written with her in mind and it shows. Nowhere in the film is she caught relaxing, even in the most ambiguous moments her eyes are crisp clear on her intentions.

Depardieu is solid but lacks the internal flame his character should possess, probably due to him being influenced by Deneuve's coldness.

Poiret and Bennent are sublime in secondary but very important roles. Richard underplays his character's potential as a threat. The rest of the cast are adequate and in control of their roles.

Truffaut delivers a quiet film with claustrophobic cinematography, low-budget sets, fabulous costumes and minimal music. Just like a real theatre show. The director's brilliance drives through the sharpness of the second World War with a fine comb and picks only what's relevant to the story, and nothing more. A film to admire, but not to be inspired from. And there lies probably the only fault of the film. The nouvelle vague has matured and settled down with a sigh.

Watch this film just to experience the ferociously magnetic beauty and strength of Catherine Deneuve. Or if you really love theatre. Or both.

The show must go on, even under occupation, to entertain subdued, and sober populations, while all the world's a stage, all around a war is waged, there's a place to find a soupçon of distraction. Behind the scenes, so many subplots are relayed, the lives of people and their characters portrayed, how their worlds are interwoven, with the threads that they've all chosen, of their conduct, how they operate, behave.

It's an extremely engaging story of survival and opportunity that's centred around a theatre in Paris during WWII. Focusing primarily on Marion Steiner, the owner of the establishment who also acts on stage, performed as elegantly as ever by Catherine Deneuve, we observe her interactions with the players and the crew as she conceals her Jewish husband, and notable director, in the bowels of the playhouse bellow. Unlike many films from the time, and on similar subjects, it still holds up to scrutiny today, and it's well worth finding the best seat in your place of residence for a matinee viewing or screening, if the possibility arises.

An almost banal story about normal people which by its naturalness attains a truly remarkable human greatness. Against the background of nazi occupation of Paris with its whole train of treasons, pusillanimities, courage, resistance, collusions and collaboration with the enemy, indignities and oppression, a theatrical company staged underground by its director who is secretly hidden because he's Jewish, puts on the stage a play about love also repressed, a play however which resounds as a freedom although smothered shout in the darkness enveloping France and Europe by then. The acting performance of Depardieu and Deneuve is brilliant as usual although very simple and natural. Besides that, Deneuve is indeed one of the most beautiful movie stars we have ever seen. This movie is also a hymn to the theatre as free expression since ancient Greece, living through the love of those who devote themselves to it, very often with abnegation and in adverse conditions. It must by all means be seen because, in spite of all, it makes us believe in human virtues which keep pace here with the theatrical actors' talent.