Last Metro, The (1980)
The Last Metro (1980), produced and directed by François Truffaut.
During the German occupation of Paris, a Jewish theater owner hides out in the cellar while his beautiful wife runs the business and acts in his plays. He listens in via a furnace grate and gives secret rehearsal notes.
In tone this sits in a curious middle ground: it's not too heavy, but neither is it an out-and-out comedy. Partly political, partly back-stage romance and drama. Truffaut said: "For me, who was an adolescent at the time, the image of France cut in two, divided into Germans and Resistance fighters, is false. I see a much calmer France."
As always, reality is more complicated than history or the myths.
Notes:
The street scenes are setup like a stage.
See the German soldier pat the little boy on the head? A minute later watch the boy's mother vigorously scrubbing his hair. That happened to Truffaut when he was 10.
The women always wear their fur coats because they are cold: fuel is rationed.
We have lovely Catherine Deneuve again. She is not only expert at running the theater and acting in the play, but after a full day she cooks her husband dinner and sometimes stays with him overnight.
She's "Marion" again, one of the director's favorite names.
Despite the war and everyone's problems: the show must go on.
The play they are doing looks dull, but is "Nordic", meaning not Jewish, and therefore is safe material.
We have gay men and women and not much made of it. Because it's French, because it's the theater, or is Truffaut a kindly memoirist?
The actor playing the director looks a lot like Truffaut himself.
The German invaders are there, but his anger is directed at the French collaborators: the theater censor and anti-semitic journalists. The French were more of threat to the French than the Germans.
Many little wartime bits: shopping in the black market, scrambling between multiple jobs to make ends meet, joining the Resistance.
Any story set backstage at the theater or movie studio is going to contrast and confuse the realities, where the fantasy becomes real and the reality becomes more like a play. The final segment hits that hard here, with more of a comic effect. The newsreels become funny and the play more tender.
RED is the color theme this time.
The title refers to the nightly curfew: everyone had to take care not to miss the last train.
Criterion Blu-ray with a lovely natural image, both dark and warm, but I suspect that was the nature of the original.
The commentary track has valuable notes by a Truffaut scholar who also worked as his translator. She says:
Truffaut always "felt Jewish", but not until the late 1960s did he discover that his biological father really was a Jew.
He and Catherine Deneuve had an affair during Mississippi Mermaid (1969). He was in bad shape after she ended it, but they were obviously friends again before this film.
He was a leg man.
Gérard Depardieu worked with Deneuve in several later films. He said he admired "the man in her". Likewise, any successful actor has to have a feminine side.
The scene where the actor beats up the fascist film critic: really happened.
This was Truffaut's most commercially successful film.
