The Last Metro (review)

In occupied Western Europe, paraphrasing the historian Tony Judt, there was no locally accredited regime - no legitimate government exercising authority - and thus, neither Norwegians, nor Belgians, nor Dutch were fully responsible for their actions. Although the Germans could not have ruled without the collaboration of the locals, it was they 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 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.

During the youth movement of the 1960s, 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 with 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 end 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...