#462: TRUFFAUT, François: The Last Metro (1980)

TRUFFAUT, François (France)

The Last Metro [1980]

Spine #462
Blu-ray

Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut's gripping, humanist character study. Against all odds — a Jewish theater manager in hiding, an actor who is in the Resistance, increasingly restrictive Nazi oversight — the troupe believes the show must go on. The Last Metro is Truffaut's ultimate tribute to art overcoming adversity.

131 minutes
Color

Monaural

in French

1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2009

Director/Writers

Script by François Truffaut and Suzanne Schiffman.

Dialogue by Truffaut, Schiffman, and Jean-Claude Grumberg.

Truffaut was 48 when he directed The Last Metro.

Other Truffaut films in the Collection:

#5: The 400 Blows (1959)
#315: Shoot The Piano Player (1960)
#281: Jules And Jim (1962)
#749: The Soft Skin (1964)
#186: Stolen Kisses (1968)
#187: Bed And Board (1970)
#769: Day For Night (1973)
#188: Love On The Run (1979)

The Film

The film is bookended by a fast-talking narrator over archival footage from the period.

The final scene, however, is not to be described, being a most intense and important spoiler! Don’t miss it, and look for beautiful details!

**

Truffaut intended a sort of trilogy about the living arts, with Day For Night (1973) {Spine #769} (movies); this film (theatre); and a film about vaudeville, which he didn’t live long enough to make.

Fortunately, the first two films in this conceived trilogy stand on their own quite nicely.

**

Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) is trying to pick up Arlette (Andréa Ferréol).

Truffaut tracks the two characters in a traveling shot with Depardeiu continually running in front of Arlette with a new line each time. It is a magnificent shot, and Arlette finally gets rid of the pestering Bernard by giving her telephone number to him. In a few beats, Bernard realizes that she’s given him the number where they give you the time of day. He looks crestfallen.

Of course, it turns out they were both headed to the same destination — the Théâtre Montmarte — putatively run by the implacable Marion Steiner (a fantastic Catherine Deneuve). Everyone connected with the theatre belives that her Jewish husband, Lucas (Heinz Bennent) has fled Nazi-occupied France — but he is actually living in the basement of the theatre, where Marion sneaks him food and conjugal visits.

Bernard is there for an audition. As he waits, he observes Marion and the gay director, Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret) discussing their reticence in hiring a Jewish actor. Cottins talks a disgusted Bernard out of walking away, and ultimately he signs a contract, stipulating that he has no Jewish blood.

Incidentally, Poiret is perhaps better known as the author of the original play La Cage aux Folles, made into a film in 1978 by Edouard Molnario {Spine #671}.

• Great line: It is opening night. As Bernard prepares to make his entrance, Raymond says to him:
• “As the boss used to say, the theater is like a bathroom and a cemetery — when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

**

The rest of the cast is stellar — including a menacing Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), the right-wing Nazi puppet; and Nadine Marsac (Sabine Haudepin), who is close to being a collaborator in her zealous ways.

Georges Delerue’s score is spare and subtle. Néstor Almendros’s cinematography also subtle, has a period-appropriate color palette.

Only the happy ending rings false, as the Gestapo rarely searched a basement hiding a Jew without success.

Film Rating (0-60):

56

The Extras

The Booklet

Sixteen-page booklet featuring an essay by Armond White.

“The Last Metro was the most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career, sweeping an armload of prizes at France’s Oscar equivalent, the César Awards. It was also as personal a film as he had ever made, and that denotes the film’s distinction: it is a private memoir graced with popular appeal. In it Truffaut conjures his memories of the German occupation of France, culling from his schoolboy years and his lifelong infatuation with the creative arts. Although the subject of the occupation had certainly been broached before in French film, it was still not a popular one at the time, with culturewide shame over collaboration lingering. But Truffaut, departing from the paranoid melodrama of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 Le Corbeau {Spine #227} and the psychological examination of Louis Malle’s 1974 Lacombe, Lucien {Spine #329} — to name two well-known examples — took a guiltless approach to the heroism and nonheroism of that grim period. He invoked nostalgia and supplied relief. In 1970, he had told France-Soir: ‘For me, who was an adolescent at the time, the image of France cut in two, divided into German and Resistance fighters, is false. I see a much calmer France.’ This story of the Théâtre Montmartre putting on a production in 1942, while under the heavy surveillance of Vichy collaborators, focuses on the different troupe members’ more intimate and peculiar acts of valor.”

Commentary

• By Annette Insdorf, author of François Truffaut.
• Excellent commentary.
• The incident where the little boy, Jacquot (Franck Pasquier), is patted on his head by a German officer, and is whisked away by his mother (Rose Thierry) to immediately wash out the filth, actually happened to Truffaut as a 10-year-old boy!
• Daxiat was based on Alain Laubreaux.
• Germaine (the dresser) is played by Paulette Dubost, who was Lisette in Renoir’s The Rules of The Game (1939) {Spine #216}.
• A chilling scene:
• Nadine is late for rehearsal. She’s dropped off at the theatre by some German soldiers.
• Raymond, the stagehand (Maurice Risch) confronts her.
• “What do you want? I was at a dubbing session.”
• “If they’d offered you a part in Jew Süss, you’d have taken it!”
• “And how! But they didn’t have a role for a French girl.”
• Rosette Goldstern (Jessica Zucman) is a stand-in for Truffaut’s collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, whose mother was deported and murdered by the Nazis.
• Of course, Truffaut adored Hitchcock. Bernard is fiddling with the record player. What could he be up to? This MacGuffin is pure Hitchcockian.

• By actor Depardieu, historian Jean-Pierre Azéma, and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana.
• Depardieu:
• Truffaut was a “rascal.” He is paying him a compliment. They were both juvenile delinquents, who made something of themselves.
• Otherwise, he speaks infrequently.
• Azéma, an expert on the Occupation is constantly on the lookout for “errors,” for which he finds very few:
• For example, it is impossible that Rosette would be seated next to a German officer. Ah, a little poetic license, if you please …
• Better are details like:
• “Lucas Steiner is an Austrian Jew and thus a stateless Jew, which makes him extremely vulnerable because of the laws of the Vichy government and the German ordinances. According to the former foreign Jews could be interned at any time by prefectural decision, with appeal. For the Germans, they were fodder for the French camp at Drancy the anteroom to the death camps.
• Something that is vague in the film is cleared up by Azéma:
• The package that is addressed to Cottins, which contains a small noose entombed in a small coffin — that would have been sent to him by the Resistance, who are — en effet — threatening him for seemingly being to too close to Daxiat.
• This makes the narrated scene at the end of the film where he twice arrested make more sense.
• [Perhaps Truffaut is being ironic here, in that Cottins — being gay — could have easily been arrested if Daxiat had exerted the power; and that the Resistance after Liberation may have been a bit too zealous in cases like his.]

Deleted scene

A delightful scene (intercut with existing material) between Marion and Valentin (René Dupré), who we learn is the author of Angels of Mercy. He is dying, and wants Marion to take the lead. She politely refuses. Without this scene, we only know that Nadine got the part.

French television

Excerpts featuring interviews with Truffaut and actors Deneuve, Depardieu, and Poiret.

Les Nouveaux Rendez-Vous

Truffaut, Deneuve and Depardieu talk about The Last Metro in this excerpted 1980 interview from the French television program Les nouveaux rendez-vous.

Passez Donc me Voir

In this excerpt from a 1980 episode of the French television program Passez donc me voir, Truffaut and Poiret discuss their work on The Last Metro and their memories of the occupation.

Performing The Last Metro

In this video piece, actors Ferréol, Dubost, and Haudepin, along with actor and second assistant director, Alain Tasma, recall the joys and challenges of working on The Last Metro.

Visualizing The Last Metro

This video piece features camera assistants Florent Bazin and Tessa Racine talking about what it was like to work with legendary cinematographer Almendros and about the creation of The Last Metro’s striking period visuals.

Working with Truffaut: Nestor Almendros

Interview with cinematographer Almendros conducted in Paris in April 1986. It was excerpted in Rainer Gansera’s 1986 documentary Arbeiten mit François Truffaut, produced by WDR, but for this edit, make exclusively for the Criterion Collection, Truffaut expert Robert Fischer constructed the interview in full from the only surviving elements.

Almendros discusses the nine films in which he collaborated with Truffaut.

Une histoire d’eau

A 1958 short film codirected by Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

A real gem! Tant pis that the two bad boys of the Nouveau Vague had such a feud.

Theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

37

56 + 37 =

93

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