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.
