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Epilogue Catching The Last Métro: François Truffaut’s Portrayal of Occupation Drama and Sexuality Perhaps the best known representation of the Occupation stage, François Truffaut’s 1980 Le Dernier Métro (The Last Métro) is, like most movies, composed of a series of erasures, reinscriptions, and constructs. Rather than re-create the past, the director and screenwriters (knowingly or unknowingly, but in either case, inevitably) deploy dramatic and cinematic conventions to forge a world, based on the wartime theatre culture of Paris, as background for a love story. Nonetheless, as almost always happens, audiences tend to (mis)take filmed fiction for fact and to confuse that which has been invented for that which was or is real. This observation about The Last Métro derives, at least in part, from the ongoing discussion of how the French, through the intervention of postwar politics, have come to regard the Occupation. As noted in chapter 5, after Paris was liberated, the French view of the Occupation was guided by Charles De Gaulle and notable historians and journalists (among them Robert Aron): The “resistancialist myth” held that France had been a nation of resistors. Indeed, the very use of the term “Occupation” conveyed the notion that France had been the (defiant) victim of the Nazi occupier. However, with Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and The Pity and Robert O. Paxton’s careful inquiry into the Vichy regime, this view began to change; more and more frequently, the name of that place where Pétain and his government established themselves appeared in the titles of works about that period between the Defeat and the Liberation. “Vichy” came to stand for the idea that France, on the whole, had not resisted and that the regime that strove to represent the French was in itself both an entity that collaborated with the Germans and that actively pursued its own fascistic agenda. 191 192 THE DRAMA OF FALLEN FRANCE Thus, in a political analysis of postwar films about the Occupation, Naomi Greene asserts that The Last Métro suffers from this “Gaullist vision of the Occupation that came under scrutiny in the 1970s,” and thus, the Occupation, she insists, figures in the film largely as an exotic, and at the same time a familiar, setting, almost at times as mere backdrop, and as “a source of conventional images” (292). Thus, charges Greene, through its romanticization, the film represses genuine memory of the Occupation, replacing it with romantic images gleaned from Hollywood movies and trivializing the period’s more significant problems (291–292). Perhaps most tellingly, Greene observes, except for the film’s villain, a collaborationist drama critic, all the characters involved in the French theatre are depicted as anti-German. This last aspect of the film strikes Greene as especially ironic, for the theatre, she writes, was “a world hardly noted for courage and resistance during the Occupation” (293). Although Greene quite soundly identifies Truffaut’s nostalgia and romanticism in his portrayal of the Occupation and presents a convincing critique of what at least appears to be the film’s political grounding, her very discussion of The Last Métro emerges as equally, if not similarly, biased. Her remark about the French theatre world during the War—“hardly noted for courage and resistance during the Occupation”—betrays a tendency perhaps as reductive as resistancialism: Rather than subscribe to the myth that the French were at heart a nation of resistors, she appears to regard collaboration as the paradigmatic mode of French (or at least of French show people’s) behavior; indeed, her evaluation even hints that this new myth has for some replaced the one propagated by DeGaulle. And although Greene may be right in her criticism of the film, her conclusions about Truffaut and his intentions ultimately simplify a work whose implications are far more problematic. I do not wish to focus directly on the more conventional political implications of The Last Métro; others have done so and certainly will continue to do so. Instead, I seek to examine what the film makes of the Occupation theatre and of its dramatic repertory, in order to consider how Truffaut (re)presents the role of the stage during this bleak period and how he makes the staged performances relevant to constructs and reconstructions of Occupation sexuality. Indeed, if The Last Métro on the surface seems to be a film about “France résistante,” on a deeper level it raises...

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