Thoughts on The Last Metro by Truffaut

This film was interesting. I liked the acting. Denueve and Depardieu make it watchable. The ending is just. No one gets violently murdered like I was expecting. I was expecting the husband to get found out. Yet, there was no big scene where he is found by the Gestapo and turned over to a concentration camp. I thought he might, but, since I haven't watched many Truffaut films, I didn't expect that everyone gets away from a violent death at the end of the film. Even the Nazi critic who threatens to take away the theater from Deneuve gets off without a violent death. Paris is liberated and the theater exists freely.

The film follows a structure. The first act sets up the conflict between the hiding theater director and the Nazis who are threatening to discover him. It transitions nicely with a subplot of a lesbian affair that adds some sex appeal to the film. The show goes on and the Nazi critic gives it a bad review which causes quite a stir. Depardiue responds in the beginning of the third act by beating up the Nazi critic. I thought at that point that Depardiue would be taken into custody. But the film does not end there. The climax occurs when the Gestapo comes for the husband. In a mad dash Denueve and Depardiue save the husband and stave off Nazi oppression.

In the end the husband survives and returns to the theater. And Depardieu and Deneuve end up having a brief tryst which I was expecting from the start. When I saw both of them onscreen I thought that something would happen between them. And finally it does.

This film was good but not great. Certainly nothing like the 400 Blows. But why should i compare it to a film from another decade. And reasonably from another era. The costumes and set designs were great. I really felt I was in 40's Paris. The women's hairstyles were tres chic and totally 40's. Of course they had their hair done in bobbs.

The film portrays Nazi aggression as too passive. The Nazis were evil. Yet the French were not innocent in their collaboration with the Nazis. Truffaut, in the biography I'm reading about him, says that there was no unified front against the Nazis in Paris or France. It, like the film in some ways, goes against the myth that all of France were active in the resistance and fought like hell to save the Jews and others from the camps. This film only gently touches that issue. When I watched the film and was thinking about the Nazi occupation of Paris I remembered Casablanca. The classic film about resistance fighters united against Nazis. Perhaps that film has mythical status. All of the French united against the Nazis and going to the limit to free a Jewish scientist, it shows that there are cracks in the myth of French unity against the Nazis. Even Jacques Chirac publicly admitted to some French being complicit in the Nazi occupation.

I should do more research in this area. I don't know all of the specifics. I wonder how many French people aided the Nazis and to what extent. I have read a book about the Nazi plundering of French art museums, galleries and private collections and it seems that there is some dispute about who was bold enough to confront the Nazis.  I should hope that I would stand in such a situation.