'The sweetness of life in an occupied country:' François Truffaut’s "Le Dernier Metro" (1980)

Originally, I sought to explore the continuities and changes in the filmic representation of the German occupation in France. I assumed to find a fascinating array of French and German productions, which not only reflect but also help to produce collective memory of both countries. I also believed that little research would unearth more popular German movies than Thomas Tielsch’s semi-documentary Die Finsternis (2005), which portrays the last days of the Vichy regime and is partially based on a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. To my surprise, I could not find further examples of German productions, and I had to contend myself with French movies representing the German occupation. Suffice it to say there are many French movies dealing with delicate period in French history. But instead of trying to condense multiple plot lines into one coherent argument, I would like to focus on one of the most popular period dramas, François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) in greater detail.

  In occupied Western Europe, paraphrasing the historian Tony Judt, there was no locally accredited regime, no legitimate government exercising authority, and thus neither Norwegians, Belgians nor Dutch were fully responsible for their actions. Although the Germans could not have ruled without the collaboration of the locals, it was them who issued the orders. The exception, of course, was France. Marshall Petain’s regime had been voted into office in July 1940 and claimed some continuity with the pre-war democratic institutions of the third French Republic. Furthermore, many French citizens regarded Vichy as their legitimate authority until November 1942. In the aftermath of the Second World War the French had to come to terms with the compliant role of the Vichy’s regime in Nazi policies. Until 1939 La Grand Nation had been a major international power; but the initial military defeat, followed by a demeaning German occupation during the Second World War and two bloody colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, were reprehensible enough to uphold the myth of a paramount French resistance for a long time in the post-war period.

  The youth movement of the 60s, artists and filmmakers such as Marcel Ophuls or historians like Robert Paxton brought about the end of the public amnesia. Ophuls’ documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) questioned the self-serving legacy of the resistance, by detailing the daily bribery and collaboration of the citizen in Clermont Ferrand, a mid-size city in central France. He produced nothing short of a new visual representation of France under German occupation. Needless to say, Ophuls’ images challenged the collective memory and triggered controversy and ideological struggle in the public sphere. Films dealing with the period that kindled this debate further include, to name just a few: Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and his later memoir Goodbye Children (1987), Claude Chabrol’s newsreel collage The Eye of Vichy (1993) and, of course, Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980).

              

     Truffaut considered The Sorrow and the Pity the first film to show this period in French history as a “non-legendary story.” He believed that in the aftermath of this movie, one couldn’t show “clowns play Vichy people or militiamen anymore.” Surprisingly enough, film critic Naomi Greene evokes precisely Ophuls’ work to condemn Truffaut’s Last Metro as a “resistancialist version of the past” a film which “takes us back, once again, to a reassuring world where ideological divisions scarcely existed” (82). Could it be that Truffaut disobeyed the public debate entirely, or do Greene and several other critics overlook the artistic and emotional depth of Truffaut’s vision of occupied Paris?

The Last Metro is the story of the prestigious Théâtre Montmartre putting on a production in late autumn of 1942. Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), the German-Jewish director of the theater is forced to go underground. His wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) takes over the management of the theater and has to survive an onslaught of anti-Semitic policies, material shortage and the looming threat of censorship. Nevertheless, apart from Madame Steiner’s preoccupation about the artistic and financial welfare of her theater, she is concerned about her husband—who is not like everyone is made to believe in South-America—but hidden in the basement of the theater. Tellingly, the play the ensemble performs is called “The woman who disappeared.” Since the curfew requires that the performance ends in time for the theatergoers to catch the last metro home, Marion can disappear every night and pay her husband a clandestine visit. At the same time, a love story unfolds between Marion and the theater’s new lead actor Bernard (Gérard Depardieu). Probing the heroism of the three lover’s affair, the film ends in a liberated Paris when the curtain falls and Lucas joins Marion and Bernard onstage together taking a bow.

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma illustrates the complex social relations between French civilians and German occupiers during the Second World War. André Zucca’s Agfacolor photography exhibited in Paris in 2008, showed how images can probe collective memory. How is it possible, asked a dismayed reviewer, that “this celebration of the victor, underlining the sweetness of life in an occupied country” were shown “without any explanation”? Buruma explains that Zucca’s lush wartime photographs portray the life of the majority of Parisians and the images are only tendentious in what they don’t show, namely they carefully avoid the harsh realities of Parisian everyday life for Jews.


                     

To say the least, Truffaut’s cinematographer Nestor Almendros managed to recreate the visual atmosphere of Zucca’s Paris to the tee. Another source of Almendros’ inspiration might have been contemporary UFA movies such as Veit Harlan’s The Golden City (1942), a film poster can be seen in the semi-documentary introduction of the movie. To this end, The last Metro’s chromatic palette is restricted to soft browns, ochers, and reds. To heighten the cinematic pleasure, the soundtrack features passionate French chansons and many film noir props such as jet-black Gestapo cars, suspicious spies and high-healed women in mink fur coats. While the theater troupe represents the good liberal French traditions, reactionary Vichy France is seemingly condensed into Daxiat, a collaborating evil journalist. Furthermore, the few German characters are cast in minor roles: a soldier who pats a boy’s head, a lieutenant who paints Sacré-Coeur, a civilian who attends the opening party of the play, and finally a sinister Gestapo officer who tries to intimidate Marion. But Truffaut manages through metonymic devices to illustrate the oppressive climate of the occupation. The filmic absence of the undeniable German presence, also sheds light on the French complicity in the German anti-Semitic policies and propaganda. For example in one of their conversations, Marion tells her husband that the Gestapo receives no less than 1500 denunciating letters from French citizens per day. However, some critics feel that Truffaut produced a melodrama that glosses over the brutal reality of the Holocaust, and focuses instead on love relationships of a theater troupe. As we will see, the film offers more than a facile exploitation of the German occupation as colorful background for a triangulated love affair.

The film is very specific in terms of décor, costumes and atmosphere. And Annette Insdorf can hardly be refuted, when she points out in her Truffaut biography (1994): “Nevertheless, The Last Metro is closer to Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be than Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, for Truffaut’s affectionate tale puts his actors rather than the Occupation in the foreground” (101). Although Truffaut alludes to actual history, his film is overtly staged. The Last Metro presents Paris under German occupation as it “might be recalled in a dream” (White, DVD liner notes). That is to say, Truffaut was not concerned with historical accuracy; he sought to connect spectators with their longing for a remembrance of things past. In a word, he was after nostalgia. The Last Metro’s narrative is a return to Truffaut’s own adolescent memories. In this respect, the movie addresses deeper humanistic issues.

  As Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram perceptively explain in their book on Truffaut (1998): “One way of approaching the films’ system of values is through the underlying tension between what Truffaut tends to term ‘the definitive’ and ‘the provisional,’” and tellingly he describes characters of a play he admired as “constantly seeking a definitive love, before settling happily for the provisional” (174f.). In The Last Metro, the anti-Semitic critic Daxiat personifies a definitive totalitarian order: his political positions concerning art, race and gender demand a static identity, while the constantly moving and acting theater troupe is a symbol for the right to dream, to re-define ones identity and sexual relationships, to whole-heartedly embrace a provisional form of life. Truffaut’s preference for liberal political positions is mirrored in the portrayal of social relationships: the triangulated love affair between Marion and Bernard with its open end clearly opposes any absolute ideal for eternal fidelity and exclusive monogamy.

                                                                                                                    

                                                       

Truffaut developed the screenplay with his assistant Suzanne Schiffman and recycled previous depictions of theaters during the German occupation. Apart from Lubitch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), a film and a TV play by Jean Renoir are the most obvious sources of Truffaut’s inspiration. On a plot level, Renoir’s play Carola (1972) even prefigures The Last Metro. Carola also features a French theater troupe during the German occupation, also hiding a vanished person, except in this depiction it is a resistance fighter. Furthermore, Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1953), is a celebration of theater that follows a traveling commedia dell’arte troupe in South America, and gives testimony of Truffaut’s obsession with cinema and theater as places where life becomes a performative act. These codes and references imparted to Truffaut by other films and media may also explain his historical omissions. Yet again, merely evoking anti-Semitism without a clear reference to the Holocaust, undoubtedly Truffaut can be criticized for having misrepresented the history of the German occupation. Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that The Last Metro is more than a cliché image of this traumatic period in French history. After all, the theater Montmartre houses Truffaut’s utopian community of artists, an alert ensemble that does not cease to fight for a humane and liberal society.

Rehearsal of the "Vanished Lady" in Le Denier Metro