" Le Dernier Métro" (1980)

She is cruel despite herself…

When Nazi Germany occupied France Francois Truffaut was eight years old; when France was liberated Francois Truffaut was twelve years old. A film director remembered the occupied France and wanted to picture it; he was able to do it and «Le Dernier Metro» became his most successful film.

In 1942, Paris is in occupied zone. People are trying to find nourishment and to escape the reality in theaters and cinema halls. One of the theaters, led by Jew Lucas Steiner, is desperately trying to survive. A spouse of Lucas, Marion Steiner, leads the theatre and get a permit to stage a Norwegian play. She is trying to save the theatre and the group and to hide the biggest secret – that her husband is living in a theatre’s cellar.

French cinema has films, which portrays one of the most controversial aspects of the French history – Second World War. «Lacombe, Lucien» portrays the general collaboration of the French society and work of minor collaborators; «Le Bon et les mechants» portrays the segretion of French underworld and police forces; «Au Revoir, Les Enfants» portrays the culture of betrayal, «Une Affaire de Femmes» portrays the hypocrisy of the Vichy France; «Un héros très discret» portrays the attempt of French consciousness to rewrite the Second World War page.

«Le Dernier Metro» portrays the French society as a whole and theater world. In September of 1942, it is still unknown whether the Allies would win the war and, if so, when France would be liberated. That is shy a lot of Frenchmen are mostly concerned with means of survival. Someone deals on the black market, someone is suing theatre costumes at home, someone is acting in propaganda films.

At the same time, the occupational authorities are beginning to put people against each other in order to better manage them. That is why snitching becomes the acceptable way to promote yourself. From every corner people hear stories about how Filthy Jews are ruining the Great France and almost everyone is afraid that someone would snitch on him that he is a Jew.

Sergei Dovlatov was absolutely right about his words «who wrote four million snitches?». Strangely, the officers of Wehrmacht are portrayed rather better, than some of the Director’s fellow countrymen. All power in France is in hands of scum, who are using propaganda as a mean of destroying their adversaries. One such voluntary collaborators is a disgusting theatre critic Daxiat, who wants to take over all theaters, including Steiner’s theatre.

From the other side, Marion Steiner and her colleagues are forced to walk on the knife edge in order to save the theater. They are forced to insert clauses into contracts that none of the actors are Jews, get censor’s visa on plays and humiliate themselves with Daxiat and other scum. Marion Steiner is forced to be «the most fervent Catholic» in order to save her husband from concentration camp.

This forced collaboration of Marion Steiner is met with ire from her colleagues, including young Bernard Granger. A member of Resistance Bernard at first considers Marion as a cold and indifferent woman and willing collaborator; later, strangely, they start to develop mutual feelings. Nevertheless, Marion cannot put at risk her colleagues.

The main enemy of any dictatorship is a free art. We all remember famous photos of book burnings in Nazi Germany. Any dictatorship is afraid of free art, because it enables to show to the people the incompetence and impotence of any «Great State». That is why almost any independent piece of art is immediately banned, but most of the censors are stupid and you could bypass them by coded language.

Francois Truffaut reminds us about a role of real art as an antidote to cultural barbarity. In staged play, there is coded message about prevailing hypocrisy and double speak and remind about a need to save humanity until the inevitable good times. The Director doesn’t judge such people, as Marion Steiner, who is forced to do unpleasant things in order to save the loved ones; the Director is judging only such scum, as Daxiat.

The Director was able to shoot an important film about a need to preserve your soul in dark times and about a sheer power of the real art. Only those people, who saved their souls, apart from «few scratches», would come back to the liberated scene and get real applause. I recommend to watch «Le Dernier Metro» with some of the films, which I mentioned in the second paragraph.