Overlooking its penchant for melodrama and formalism as well as its domineering theatrics, Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro strikes a personal, humanistic chord that rang more introspective than I had anticipated. Perhaps the prevalence of war motifs helped anchor the nuances of realism found underneath Metro’s gaudy color palette, but the way confinement is perpetrated as this powerful central theme is poetically human.
What’s most fascinating about Truffaut’s approach in Metro is the way he perceives the foreboding grip that Germany held on France during their occupation in World War II; it’s subtle, yet simultaneously intense. The cliche of Nazi Germany’s menacing ways also isn’t illustrated quite the way you’d expect in Metro; in fact, it’s virtually absent. However, the hostilities that France was subjected to during Germany’s occupation echoes loudly in Truffaut and Suzanne Schiffman’s script. But the nature of war and marginalization eventually take a backseat to a more romantic tale.
The Last Metro documents the trials of Theatre Montmartre, a French theatre struggling with censors and other torments during Germany's occupation of Paris. Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), the director – and in some senses matriarch – of this theatre somehow handles distressful predicaments with calm and ease, including the sheltering of her Jewish husband and former theatre director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent) from the Nazis. From the theatre’s cellar, Lucas begins to use Marion as a conduit to oversee production of an upcoming play via notes, suggestions and even light criticisms toward Marion herself. The integrity of their marriage is ultimately tested by Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu), an aspiring resistance member who plays Marion’s romantic opposite on stage.
Metro accomplishes all the standard truisms you’d expect to find in a melodrama centralizing on the theatre; backstage elements, scandalous affairs, etc. But what separates Metro from films like To Be or Not to Be is the painstaking detail imbued into Truffaut’s script. A great portion of this detail can be accredited to Truffaut’s childhood, which saw accounts of black marketing and the like on several occasions. Subtleties like women drawing stocking facades on their legs or Parisians smuggling black market hams in cello cases – instances all witnessed by Truffaut – serve as a distinctive border between Metro and his other melodramatic works; see The Story of Adele H.
The strict confinement of action to Theatre Montmartre is my only quibble with Metro, yet this sense of confinement has a way of alienating the viewer in the same way Lucas is alienated in his cellar, so perhaps it’s simply clever symbolism on Truffaut's part. Deneuve, Depardieu and Bennent all play their roles convincingly enough to pull off a rather complex love triangle, but the element of romanticism is undercut by the vagueness of this triangle; which is especially vague in Lucas’ sudden familiarity with Marion’s affection for Bernard. There’s also a little resistance subplot involving Bernard that materializes infrequently alongside the central plot; an exciting angle wasted.
Although I don’t view Metro as an actors’ film where mesmerizing performances take center stage – though Deneuve performs wonderfully outside her element – it does manage to convey the climate of occupation realistically as well as the conditions that Jewish civilians in France lived under during the war. The notion of displacement and the subsequent pathos that emerge is a remarkably profound subject, and the script is more than effective in getting that across. Having only seen a handful of Truffaut films, I’d rank Metro amongst my favorites.
8/10
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