The Last Metro

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

Catherine Deneuve plays Marion, the actress holding together a Paris playhouse 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, who had lived through the Occupation as a child, recreates its atmosphere of fear, compromise and improvised courage with affection for the theatre as a refuge, 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 avoided the subject of collaboration, and its blend of romance, history and backstage drama proved widely beloved. Pairing two of France's biggest stars under a master's direction, it endures as a warm, intelligent crowd-pleaser. Elegant and quietly moving, The Last Metro is Truffaut's heartfelt salute to art's persistence in the darkest of times. Pairing Deneuve and Depardieu at their most luminous, it endures as one of the most cherished films of Truffaut's later career. Read partly as Truffaut's answer to critics who felt French cinema had dodged the subject of collaboration, it became his greatest popular success.