Le dernier métro

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.

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')

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.

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.

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.