Cinema Classics: The Last Metro
IFC had a wonderful surprise in their 8 a.m. - 10 a.m. slot: Truffaut's "The Last Metro"! (which I'd never seen before, although I've heard a lot about it over the years...) Set in WWII during the occupation of Paris, the film revolves around the life of the Monmartre Theatre, its owners, the players, Paris theater journalists, and Nazis (naturally.) It's an amazingly human movie which, 30 years on, does not have the feel of a movie that could have been tinged with a wierd 70's notstalgia that plagues many other films of the same period. Films of the 70's and early '80's have a certain "feel" to them (as most movies do of their own times) and yet "The Last Metro" feels as if it is not of that filmmaking era.
Most of this more than likely has to do with the storytelling abilities of Francois Truffaut. Many Americans who are not cinephiles would recognize Truffaut as Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (kind of like we know who Alec Guinness for his role as Obi Wan Kenobi..but I digress.) It might be easy to say "well, Truffaut's French! and we all know those Europeans make better movies than kitsch-conscious Americans" but that simply isn't the case. Truffaut was in a class of filmmakers that understand the human condition on a deep level, and can get their actors to transform into the characters they are portraying.
The actors, under Truffaut's direction, become the people they are portraying. It's a subtle thing that doesn't always happen, even in some of the most enjoyable films.
Tres Nouvelle! (pardon my lousy French...)
Maybe it's just something about French society that allows for the fact that women aren't always the long-suffering faithful ones of the marriage. And maybe it's just something in French films that acknowledges the essential sexuality of women. It's not that women don't ever suffer consequences--some suffer horrid consequences, have to confront mistresses--but in "The Last Metro" [SPOILER] it appears that Mme Steiner gets to have her husband and young lover. [end] Relationships in French cinema are never easy, never cut and dried, never confined to a kind of monogamy that so many people can't sustain for whatever reasons. French cinema isn't ashamed of the complexities of relationships between men and women. And that, too, is something that makes "The Last Metro" something of a timeless masterpiece--and one that could never be made by an American filmmaker (thank the gods of cinema!)
If you ever get the chance, please do watch this beautiful film.
