Le Dernier métro (1980) - film review

Paris, 1942.  During the Nazi Occupation of France, Marion Steiner, a well-known actress of stage and screen, manages the Montmartre Theatre.  Her husband, the Jewish playwright and director Lucas Steiner, is believed to have escaped to South America, whereas in fact he is hiding in the cellars of the theatre.  Only Marion knows of her husband’s true whereabouts and she is desperately trying to arrange his safe passage out of France, aware that if he is caught by the Nazis he will sent to a concentration camp.  The theatre is currently rehearsing Steiner’s latest play, La Disparue, in which Marion is to star opposite a newcomer to her company, a young actor named Bernard Granger who, unbeknown to his employer, is involved in resistance activity.  Marion’s loyalty to her husband comes under severe strain when she begins to find herself attracted to her handsome young co-star...

Even as late as the 1970s, the Nazi Occupation of France was a subject that had been seldom explored in French cinema.  Those few films that had broached les années noires (1940-1944) tended to focus on the heroism of those who had worked in the resistance and the venality of those who had collaborated with the occupying Germans.  Marcel Ophüls’s landmark documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) came as something of a revelation, since it implied that real life as experienced by most people in France during the Occupation was nothing like what had been portrayed in films.  The majority of the population were neither heroes nor villains.  Most people went on with their lives as best they could, neither supporting nor opposing the occupation - just muddling through.

It is this facet of the Occupation that director François Truffaut had long wanted to bring to the screen.  One of his biggest regrets was that he had not been able to set his Les 400 coups (1959) during the war years, when he had been an adolescent growing up in occupied Paris.  When he came to make Le Dernier métro, Truffaut was determined to portray the period as authentically as possible, and in doing so he paved the way for the numerous films set during the Occupation that were subsequently made.  The director drew not only on his own vivid memories but undertook extensive research with his frequent script collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, trawling historical documents, memoirs and books of the time.  The title that Truffaut chose for the film alludes to one of the darker aspects of Parisian life during the Occupation: anyone who missed the last train home and was found in the streets during the curfew hours faced being arrested and possibly deported.   The film’s accuracy and attention to detail make it a useful point of reference for any student of this era.

As well as the Occupation, Le Dernier métro embraced another aspect of life that Truffaut was keen to explore - the world of the theatre.  After La Nuit américaine (1973), a light-hearted but illuminating portrait of the fraught process of filmmaking, Truffaut envisaged making two further films about show business, one set in the theatre, the other in the music hall.  Regrettably, the director’s premature death in 1984 prevented him from completing the trilogy with L’Agence magic, his homage to the lost art of vaudeville.

In developing the screenplay for Le Dernier métro, Truffaut was greatly influenced by Jean Renoir’s play Carola (adapted as an American TV film in 1973) and Ernst Lubitsch’s film To Be or Not to Be (1942), although many of the characters in his film were based on real people.  The story of the theatre owners Marion and Lucas Steiner was inspired by the real-life experiences of the dancer Margaret Leibovici (aka Miss Bluebell) and her composer husband Marcel, who were employed at the Folies Bergère.  The theatre critic Daxiat (superbly played by Jean-Louis Richard, a frequent co-scénariste of Truffaut) is closely modelled on the notorious anti-Semitic journalist Alain Laubreaux, whose run-in with Jean Marais (after the former had published a vicious critique of Jean Cocteau) is recreated in the film.  The arrest of the character Jean-Louis Cottins after the Liberation mirrors the fate of the playwright and actor Sacha Guitry, a man whom Truffaut greatly admired.

Le Dernier métro would be François Truffaut’s most expensive production, one which was way beyond the resources of his production company Les Films du Carrosse.  Having secured a budget of eleven million francs with the backing of Gaumont and the French TV station TF1, Truffaut was obligated to cast two stars for the leading roles, something he had not done since his disastrous 1969 film La Sirène du Mississippi.  Perversely, Truffaut offered the lead actress of that film, Catherine Deneuve, the main role in Le Dernier métro, so convinced was he that she was perfect for the part of a strong-willed woman leading a double life.  Deneuve’s suitability for the part of Marion is borne out by the skill with which she manages to portray two distinct personas in the same character (living with a split identity being the central theme of the film).  Outwardly, the actress shows us someone who is entirely in control, dispassionate and certain in her beliefs.   Yet, beneath the surface, we can readily discern the other Marion: emotionally confused, passionate and genuinely afraid.

For the male lead, Truffaut opted for Gérard Depardieu, a rising young actor who had distinguished himself in Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses (1974)  and Préparez vos mouchoirs (1978).  Depardieu initially had great reservations about working with a director who, in his view, appeared to be only concerned with bourgeois themes.  As it turned out, Depardieu and Truffaut quickly established a warm friendship and mutual respect, and they would work together on the director’s next film, La Femme d’à coté (1981).   This was to have been followed by many other collaborations, but Truffaut’s death put paid to these.

In one of French cinema’s most celebrated screen partnerships, Depardieu and Deneuve complement one another perfectly.   What both actors have in common is a striking incongruity between the natural persona and the outward appearance.  Depardieu’s solid physical presence is belied by a sensitive personality and gentleness that make him appear tragically vulnerable.  Similarly, Deneuve’s ethereal fairytale princess bearing is contradicted by an almost masculine self-assurance and toughness.   Whilst Depardieu and Deneuve are both fine actors in their own right, something magical happens when they share the same spotlight.  Their subtly magnetic on-screen rapport suggests not the usual collision of romantic impulses but rather the subtle crisscrossing of ripples on a placid lake, an interaction that is profound, poetic and inordinately complex.  The two actors would subsequently appear together in Claude Berri’s Je vous aime (1980), Alain Corneau’s Le Choix des armes (1981) and Fort Saganne (1984) and André Téchiné Les Temps qui changent (2004).  

As ever, Truffaut showed impeccable judgement in his allocation of the supporting roles.  The part of the stand-in director went to Jean Poiret, who was at the time known for his camp comedic roles, usually opposite Michel Serrault.  For the part of the Jewish playwright, Truffaut chose the celebrated German actor Heinz Bennet, who had previously starred in Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977) and Volker Schlöndorff The Tin Drum (1979).  The go-getting actress Nadine was played by Sabine Haudepin who, aged six, had debuted in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962).  In one of his earliest film appearances, Richard Bohringer is cast as a decidedly nasty Gestapo officer.  And playing the lesbian actress Arlette is Andréa Ferréol, who had been noted for her performance in Marco Ferreri’s La Grande bouffe (1973).

Although Truffaut had some serious concerns about Le Dernier métro (he was particularly anxious over how the public would react to a film about the Occupation), it proved to be a runaway success, a box office hit both in France and abroad.  In France alone it attracted an audience of over three million on its first release, a welcome success for Truffaut after the commercial failure of La Chambre verte (1978) and the lukewarm reception of L’Amour en fuite (1979).  Critical reaction was also generally positive.  The film virtually swept the board at the 1981 Césars, winning ten awards out of twelve nominations.  As well as scooping all the awards in the main categories of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Depardieu) and Best Actress (Deneuve), it won six awards in the minor categories: for Best Screenplay, Best Music, Best Sound, Best Editing, Best Set Design and Best Cinematography.  Le Dernier métro was Truffaut’s last great success, although some commentators saw this as proof that the director had sold out to commercial cinema and no longer merited his auteur status.  Some lamented the fact that Truffaut’s triumph completely eclipsed some more worthy cinematic contributions that year, such as Maurice Pialat’s Loulou, Alain Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amérique, Claude Sautet’s Un Mauvais fils and Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie).

With its ochre-tinted palette, intense performances and confined setting, Le Dernier métro offers one of cinema’s most potent evocations of France’s period of Nazi Occupation.  The split identity of a nation living under an occupying power is reflected in the dual nature of each of the protagonists, who, like all French people of the time, are compelled to make compromises in order to survive.  Just as Marion is unable to choose between the husband she has sworn to protect and the charismatic young actor she is irresistibly drawn to, so Bernard is torn between his passion for the theatre and his desire to devote himself to resistance activity.  Many of the secondary characters are in the same predicament, having to present one face to the world whilst carefully guarding their true nature.  No character appears strong enough to live up to his ideals, to commit to his true passion and see it through, come what may.  Instead, they all pursue a fractured double life, living not in the sunshine of desire but beneath a dark cloud of ambivalence, like the majority of French people of this period.  There may be tears beneath the greasepaint, but the show must go on.

© James Travers 2010

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