Monthly Archives: February 2022

  • The Last Metro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le dernier métro

    François Truffaut (1980)

    François Truffaut’s article ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’, published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954, was instantly controversial and helped sow the seeds of the French New Wave and the auteur theory of film-making.   Truffaut’s targets in ‘A Certain Tendency’ were ‘la tradition de qualité’ and ‘le cinéma de papa’.  He praised the small group of French directors[1] whose personal vision and style transcended the suffocating conventions of national cinema.  Within a few years, Truffaut was making films, each one an exultant proof of his own individuality – The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Pianist (1960), Jules and Jim (1962).  Two decades later, he was, like it or not, part of the French cinema establishment.  The Last Metro proved to be one of his biggest commercial successes, in France and internationally.  The direction, design and performances are very smoothly orchestrated.  To use Truffaut’s own pejorative, the film reeks of ‘qualité’, and doesn’t amount to much.

    The setting of The Last Metro (which Truffaut wrote with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean-Claude Grumberg) is a Paris theatre in 1942.  The film’s title – an appealing one, though it has little significance in the story that follows – refers to the curfew that operated throughout the German Occupation, obliging theatre audiences to hurry to catch the last train home.  The Théâtre Montmartre is owned by a married couple, Lucas and Marion Steiner.  Before the Occupation, he directed the plays there; she was, and remains, the leading lady.  Lucas is Jewish and assumed now to have fled Paris, leaving gentile Marion (Catherine Deneuve) in charge.  In fact, Lucas (Heinz Bennent) is living in hiding in the theatre cellar, where he and his wife regularly spend time together, making love and discussing the upcoming production of a Norwegian play called ‘Disappearance’.  Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), a rising star of the Paris stage, joins the company to play the male lead in ‘Disappearance’ opposite Marion, unaware that Lucas is on hand to direct the play.  Bernard doesn’t notice that Marion is immediately attracted to him.  She doesn’t know that, outside rehearsals, Bernard’s a member of the Resistance.

    The film’s opening scene and its delayed punchline set the tone.  En route to the Théâtre Montmartre for a first meeting with Marion, Bernard enthusiastically tries to pick up a woman (Andréa Ferrol) in the street.  She gives him the brush-off repeatedly and disappears into the place where he’s heading:  the woman turns out to be Arlette, the company’s wardrobe mistress, who’s revealed to be lesbian.  Forty years on, Bernard’s chat-up routine and the comic payoff aren’t likely to be found as, respectively, endearing and amusing as Truffaut meant them to be, but I hope they wouldn’t have made me laugh even in 1980.  You certainly don’t need to be woke to yawn at them now.   As well as Arlette, notable members of the Théâtre Montmartre include Jean-Loup (Jean Poiret), the gay assistant director who wants to keep on the right side of both Marion and his German contacts; the harassed, hard-working technician Raymond (Maurice Risch); and Germaine (Paulette Dubost), a similarly long-serving, backstage unsung heroine who lives for the place.  Sadine Haudepin (who played the little girl in Jules and Jim) is another of the actresses in the company.  All these characters are perfectly well played but Truffaut insists on their being innocuous – to tiresome effect.   The one astringent presence is the anti-semitic collaborationist Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), though I was never clear if he was a newspaper owner or a theatre critic (or both).  Daxiat’s threat to take over the Théâtre Montmartre is a doubly puzzling strand of the story:  when he makes the threat, you wonder why he didn’t do so before; once he’s made it, it fizzles out.

    Gérard Depardieu’s easy command is quite something.  The more quietly nuanced Heinz Bennent also does fine work.  Catherine Deneuve is as glamorously inexpressive as ever.  It’s an effective touch that Lucas, who hears rehearsals in the cellar through a heating vent, intuits that his wife is in love with Bernard; and Truffaut closes the film with a thoroughly successful coup de théâtre.  Bernard has decided to give up acting for the duration and work full-time for the Resistance.  He and Marion make love just before he leaves the theatre.  A few moments later, Truffaut cuts to a hospital ward, where an injured Bernard lies in bed and Marion visits him, then reveals this to be the closing scene of a play that Lucas wrote in the cellar, and which is now being staged post-Occupation.  The audience, in which Nazi uniforms are now conspicuous by their absence, applauds.  Lucas joins Marion and Bernard on stage.  The three sides of the love triangle that’s taken shape now are de-constructed as the trio takes a curtain call.  It’s a witty, graceful conclusion – yet weightless, too.

    It wouldn’t be fair to describe The Last Metro as impersonal.  It reflects Truffaut’s warm feelings for the theatre and theatre people as Day for Night did for cinema and those involved in creating it.  Just as ‘Meet Pamela’, the movie in production in Day for Night, looked duff, so the play being prepared and performed in The Last Metro sounds dire.  It’s true the Théâtre Montmartre’s choice of ‘Disappearance’ makes a political point, too – the piece is considered by the Nazis racially irreproachable.  Even so, the mediocrity that ‘Disappearance’ and ‘Meet Pamela’ share seems meant to illustrate the depth of Truffaut’s affection for the medium he’s portraying:  theatre, like film, is an invaluable good in itself and the merit of any particular play or movie is relatively unimportant.  This isn’t the view Truffaut took as an often boldly deprecatory critic in the 1950s and I doubt it’s what impelled him to become a film-maker.  The Last Metro can be seen as his celebration of theatrical pretence and human resilience just as Day for Night is considered his ‘love letter to the cinema’.  But Truffaut expressed his love of the medium, and of people, more powerfully and memorably by making a film like The 400 Blows.

    21 January 2022

    [1] Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Roger Leenhardt, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati.

  • The Killing Fields

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roland Joffé (1984)

    Roland Joffé’s account of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime is a prodigious feat of logistics.  It’s wonderfully photographed and edited, by Chris Menges and Jim Clark respectively.  Mike Oldfield’s score avoids grandiosity, much of the time anyway.   The Killing Fields comes up short because its characters – the non-Cambodians, that is – aren’t integrated with the grimly authentic context that Joffé creates.

    Bruce Robinson’s screenplay is based on a work of non-fiction, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, by the New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose relationship with the title character of his book (first published in 1980) is the heart of the film.  Schanberg (Sam Waterston) first arrives in Phnom Penh in 1973, during the civil war between the Cambodian national army and the communist Khmer Rouge.  Dith Pran (Haing S Ngor), himself a journalist, is also Schanberg’s interpreter.  He, Schanberg and photographer Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) are placed under arrest, though only temporarily, when Rockoff takes pictures of the killing of Khmer Rouge operatives.  The action soon moves forward to 1975, the time of Pol Pot’s takeover.  Schanberg secures evacuation for Pran and his family; his wife and their children leave Cambodia but Pran insists on staying in Phnom Penh to assist his American friend.  When Schanberg and Rockoff are again arrested and threatened with execution, it’s Pran who successfully negotiates for their lives to be spared.  The trio takes refuge, along with other journalists and medics (played by Athol Fugard, Patrick Malahide, Bill Paterson and Julian Sands), in the French embassy.  The Khmer Rouge orders all Cambodian citizens there to be handed over.  After the failure of desperately ingenious attempts to forge a British passport for Pran, he’s turned over to the new regime.

    Back in America, Schanberg, with no idea of his interpreter’s fate, starts a campaign to locate him but this gains little momentum.  One of millions coerced into ‘Year Zero’ forced labour, Pran shows continuing resource and resistance in the prison conditions in which he lives.  As the ‘disappearance’ of intellectuals gathers force, he feigns simple-mindedness.  He tries to escape; while on the run, he stumbles into one of the regime’s ‘killing fields’.  After being recaptured, he’s assigned to a new prison compound and works for a man called Phat (Monirak Sisawath), now disillusioned with the Khmer Rouge and who increasingly entrusts his young son to Pran’s care.  After intervening to try to prevent hardline regime officers from killing his colleagues, Phat himself is shot dead.  In the ensuing confusion, Pran escapes the compound with Phat’s son and others.  A long trek through the jungle begins, which Pran alone survives.  In New York, Schanberg eventually receives news that Pran is alive and a refugee in a Red Cross camp on the border with Thailand.  Schanberg flies out to the camp, where he and Pran are reunited.

    The impressive kinetic passages of The Killing Fields bring to mind those of The Deer Hunter (1978) and the two are worth comparing in another way.  Michael Cimino’s film is far from flawless but the hour-long wedding episode with which it begins ensures that, by the time the young men played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage arrive in Vietnam, the viewer knows them as individuals and understands them to embody a particular set of American values.  In purely realistic terms, it’s perhaps questionable that these three friends in a Pennsylvania steel town are part of the same army unit in Vietnam:  the audience accepts this because we accept the trio as their culture’s representatives in the story.  Besides, Cimino’s fictional characters are more believable than the real people interpreted by Sam Waterston and John Malkovich in The Killing Fields, able as both actors are.  The Sydney Schanberg of the film comes across as a hollow invention to place at the centre of a conscience drama.  Receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war in Cambodia, he criticises American foreign policy and says that Dith Pran should be sharing the Pulitzer.  Afterwards, Schanberg is confronted by Rockoff, who accuses him of using Pran to win the award and of not now doing enough to try and find him.  This exchange and Schanberg’s subsequent, soul-searching conversation with his sister (Joanna Merlin) are worse than phony and mechanical:  their prominence in the narrative is offensive.  Next to the Khmer Rouge atrocities and their effects on the Cambodian people, Schanberg’s moral anguish is of minor importance.

    I hadn’t seen The Killing Fields since soon after its original release; it was showing at BFI in their regular ‘Member Picks’ slot and the handout for the screening began with a quote from the member who made this pick:  ‘An important piece of history, which should be kept alive’.   No arguing with the sentiment and Roland Joffé’s picture has lost none of its quasi-documentary power but is biographical drama the best way of keeping history alive?  The form has a tendency to limit and distort historical perspective – this film does, at any rate.  Even Dith Pran’s gripping story is told by means of well-used tropes of other movie genres – the suspense around the fake passport, the repeatedly perilous jungle journey, against-all-odds survival – though it gains greatly in authenticity because Pran is incarnated by Haing S Ngor.  As well as proving himself a fine actor, Ngor was an actual survivor of the Cambodian prison camps (it’s a savage irony that in 1996 he was shot dead outside his Los Angeles home).  The reality he carries with him on screen is a big part of what makes the closing scene of The Killing Fields emotionally potent:  the final embrace between Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran is moving.  It would be even more moving without the plaintive accompaniment of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, a cliché even by 1984.

    19 January 2022

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