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')

This is a very well made movie. In particular, acting, writing and direction are superb and it just goes to show you that you don't need car chases and explosions to make a good film.

The movie is set in a theater in occupied France. The main concern through most of the movie is that they will come to take the Jewish husband of Catherine Deneuve who is hiding in the basement.

Gerard Depardieu provides excellent support as well and his decision at the end of the movie caught me a little off guard.

So, for those NOT familiar with the work of Truffault, it is an easy to watch starter--easier to take than some of his earlier work for the uninitiated.

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.

As a sketch of an era, this affectionate story of the plain and symbolic parable of the stage is a tenderly staged and skillfully shot bit, and it substantiates Truffaut's passion for art and its power to endure even throughout the most turbulent of times. The story is set in 1942 and orbits mainly around the people working within the Théâtre Montmatre, a renowned Parisian theater that, like all theaters during the Occupation, is in perpetual peril of being shut down by the collaborationist Vichy government. The theater is run by its star Catherine Deneuve, the wife of the theater's Jewish director, Heinz Bennent, who has fled the country, or so he's thought to have. The theater has recently gotten an shot of fresh life in the form of Gérard Depardieu, a committed rising actor who made his bones at the Grand Guignol and has been hired to play the lead role in a Scandinavian play called Disappearance that Bennent chose right before his own vanishing act. Unbeknownst to the rest of the ensemble, Depardieu plots numerous feats of sabotage when he's not in rehearsal.

The screenplay by Truffaut and Suzanne Schiffman builds drama along various interconnected threads. First is the future of the theater. Its unceasing threat owes to pervasive censorship, which is personified by the utterly vile, anti-Semitic theater critic Jean-Louis Richard, whose harsh reviews bear much more than just critical import. For Truffaut, who began as a film critic with a repute for being hardnosed and sometimes brutal, Richard's is a genuinely dismal individual as he has warped the critic's duty of promoting art into a poisonous mishmash of biased persecution and explicit prejudice. This links to a succeeding strand of conflict in the film, which is the problem of whether Bennent will be exposed. Deneuve is the only person who's aware of his location, and when she visits him it is both an effort to maintain their marriage and an occasion for him to give her notes on the direction of the play. Consequently, the director prolongs his creative undertakings clandestinely, using his wife as his puppet.

There is also romantic friction in the film, as Deneuve and Depardieu cultivate an implicit attraction that, rather than drawing them together, deters them like divergent ends of a magnet. Both actors were foremost stars of the French cinema, and Truffaut uses their luminous screen presence to distinguished effect, protracting their attraction to one another like a piano wire that ultimately breaks when Depardieu goes off on Richard's behavior toward Deneuve in one of his reviews and thus puts the whole theater in jeopardy. Deneuve and Depardieu make an absorbing screen pair merely since they're so completely disparate, she being the elegant French beauty, composed and sophisticated, while he is an uncharacteristic French leading man, with his hulky body, odd looks, and coarse disposition. Early in the film Deneuve likens his character to Jean Gabin in La Bête Humaine, which lets Truffaut self-consciously associate his leading man to one of the French cinema's screen idols and also to allude to Renoir, one of his favorite directors.

While there are countless characters in the film whose intermingling story lines compel its energy, the real hero is the Théâtre Montmartre itself, which becomes a badge of the strength of art and the spirit of resistance, both of which Truffaut idealizes almost to a blemish. We can see this in celebrated cinematographer Nestor Almendros's use of color, which is largely hues of amber and brown that are counterbalanced by the arresting use of red within the theater, portentous of the fervor of artistic triumph just within its otherwise measly frontage. It's for sure that this most clever of love stories is a crowd-pleasing movie that commemorates its characters' determination during a bleak time that many viewers at the time could still readily recall. And, while it is not one of Truffaut's most brilliant works, it is all the same a remarkable and appealing film, one that echoes the great filmmaker's affection fir inventive concept and its part in sustaining civilization.