The Last Metro

François Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980) was the director's greatest commercial success and swept the Césars, where it won ten awards including Best Film and Best Director. It is a tribute to the theatre and to the people who lived through the Occupation, and it ranks among the most popular and accomplished films of his later years.

Catherine Deneuve plays Marion, the actress holding a Paris playhouse together while her Jewish husband (Heinz Bennent) hides in the basement, listening through the floor; Gérard Depardieu is the leading man with secret ties to the Resistance. Truffaut had lived through the Occupation as a child, and he recreates its atmosphere of fear, compromise and improvised courage with evident affection for the theatre as a refuge, a place where the show must go on whatever the cost outside.

The film was read partly as Truffaut's answer to critics who felt French cinema had dodged the subject of collaboration, and its blend of romance, history and backstage drama made it his greatest popular success. It pairs two of France's biggest stars, Deneuve and Depardieu, at their most luminous, under a director in full command of his craft, and it remains a warm, intelligent crowd-pleaser. Elegant and moving, The Last Metro is Truffaut's salute to art that persists in the darkest of times, and one of the most cherished films of his later career.