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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truffaut at his best, 12 Jan 2003
This is one of Truffaut's best films. In his usual gentle and subtle style he tells the story of a theatre and the people working and living in it during WWII - and what an incredible cast he had. Catherine Deneuve - there is no one who had fit better the role of Marion Steiner. It's amazing how much she expresses by saying nothing. Gerard Depardieu - as the young, ambitious actor involved with the Resistance. The two have a very unique chemistry! It is a beautiful movie - and definitely a must see!!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Probably Best Appreciated by the No Longer Young, 23 Nov 2009
"The Last Metro" (1980), ("Le Dernier Metro"in the French), a dramatic romance with comic touches, was directed and co-written (with Suzanne Schiffman) by greatly esteemed modern French master filmmaker Francois Truffaut. It opens in 1942, in wartime France, in a Paris that has been occupied by German troops, where the French are mainly just trying to hang on, find food to eat and clothes to wear, and live something resembling their normal lives, while in the hands of the enemy.
It centers on Marion Steiner, an uncannily beautiful actress, as played by Catherine Deneuve(Belle de Jour - 40th Anniversary [1967] [DVD]; The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg [DVD] [1964]). We are told that she was initially a film actress, but now stars regularly at the Theater Montmartre, which was previously owned by her Jewish husband Lucas, played by the ruggedly handsome German actor Heinz Bennent ("The Lost Honour of Katharine Blum"). Lucas was also previously always her director; but he now, supposedly, has fled the Nazis. However, he is actually hidden in the theater's basement, where Marion must feed, comfort and care for him, while continuing to be the theater's star actress; she also must run the theater's business, as he used to do. The third major character in this ensemble picture is the womanizing young actor Bernard Granger, secretly in the Resistance, played by a younger, magnetic, almost handsome Gerard Depardieu (Green Card [DVD] [1991]; The Return Of Martin Guerre [1982] [DVD]). He's been hired away from the Grand Guignol to star opposite her in the theater's latest production, "Disappearance," written by and secretly directed from the cellar by, her husband Lucas. The financial future of the theater depends on the success of this production. A handsome Jean Poirot (Les Carabiniers [DVD] [1964] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]) plays Jean-Loop Cottins, a theater employee who has supposedly stepped in to direct their play. The film received an Oscar nomination, several Golden Globes nominations, and many Cesars (the French Oscar equivalent.)
So it's a film about theater people, struggling to keep their theater alive. There are those who think Truffaut simply used the popular old "let's put on a show, kids," genre as a vehicle to tell his tale about life in occupied Paris: the director was born in 1932, was therefore ten years old at the Occupation - the age of a little boy who features in the story -- and surely had clear memories and first-hand experience of life then. In addition, it is one of the director's last films, and he may have expected it would be his last; his final chance to tell the tales closest to his heart. Others consider it a failing that Truffaut, once at the cutting edge of the new wave ("Nouvelle vague") in French cinema, should have returned to a relatively traditional French format, with beginning, middle and end, and echoes of Marcel Carne, and Jean-Pierre Melville, among his other forebears in French cinema.
It is a wartime love story, and can be considered as a romantic comedy such as was made by these previous directors, a love triangle that plays out as a mature "Casablanca," in fact. It's beautifully filmed, and Truffaut and his cinematographer give you an acute sense of the claustrophobia all the characters, but most particularly Lucas, trapped in his cellar, must have felt under the Occupation. The filmmakers were also influenced by the muted sepia colors that remind us of that time; costumes and the - inexpensive--sets (it was not an expensive film) are muted in color, and, in fact, Truffaut used a less color-saturated film than he usually did in its making. Then there are those, such as my husband, who complain that it's not the film they wanted to see; something more overtly dramatic, more firing squads, etc.; nope, it's the film Truffaut wanted to make. The acting, by the three principals and the supporting players, is superb; and, for once, the astonishingly beautiful Deneuve's perceived coldness works in the movie's favor.
"The Last Metro?" It was the last subway train that could get the city's working commuters home before the curfew imposed on them: to miss it meant an uncomfortable, or possibly dangerous, night out. The well-known French actor Jean Marais, whose real-life thrashing of the pro-Nazi "Je Suis Partout" theater critic Alain Labreaux inspired a scene in the movie, has said that that train was packed with theater people, ` le tout Paris.' The `show must go on' axiom is certainly central to the movie, and the theater, whether physically in the one particular building, or in the abstract, is the most important unaccredited character in the script. The movie is often considered Truffaut's valentine to the theater; however, I myself consider it a somewhat tart valentine. It's not unusual for co-stars, whether in theater or film, to fall in love, as happens here, and Lucas, trapped in his cellar, probably can't prevent it. But he is complaisant: he wants that feeling between the costars in the play in current production, and in the next one he's working on, too. A bitter-sweet French movie, about love for the no longer young, probably best appreciated by the no longer young. And I do love it.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Minor Truffaut, but still quite enjoyable, 8 Jun 2007
Although Truffaut had another two films in him, in many ways The Last Metro looks as if it was planned as his last movie, even down to filming a deleted scene (included on the Tartan PAL DVD but not this Cinema Club issue) where a dying director tries to convince Catherine Deneuve's heroine to star in his last film. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it sums up his life and work so much as it feels as if the somewhat half-hearted screenplay has been rushed into production without being entirely thought through. Not that its bad - indeed parts of it are quite enjoyable - more that it tends to drift by like exactly the kind of `well-made play' that he once attacked, with the romance barely developed and much of the interest coming from characters on the sidelines, such as Jean-Louis Richard's critic, collaborator and anti-Semitic propagandist. At it's best it comes over like a theatrical variation on Day For Night set against the German occupation (indeed, Richard was DFN's co-writer), without ever quite matching that film's emotional rollercoaster ride.
As with other Truffaut titles previously issued by Tartan, the new Cinema Club DVD drops most of that version's extras - in this case a deleted scene, 2 contemporary interviews with Truffaut bemoaning the film's 'failure' (despite it's box-office and critical success) and footage from the Cesar Awards. However, the Cinema Club DVD does retain the audio commentary by Jean-Pierre Azema and Gerard Depardieu and the original trailer, but you'd be better off tracking down the deleted Tartan disc.
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