The Last Metro/ Le Dernier métro

 

North American Premiere (restored version) • Drama • France, 1980

DCP • 1.66 • Mono • Color • 133 min

Directed by: François Truffaut

Written by: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Claude Grumberg

Cinematography: Nestor Almendros

Film Editing: Martine Barraqué, Jean-François Gire

Original Score: Georges Delerue

Produced by: François Truffaut, Madeleine Morgenstern (Les Films du Carrosse), TF1 Films Production, SEDIF.

Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Marion), Gérard Depardieu (Bernard), Jean Poiret (Jean-Loup), Andréa Ferréol (Arlette ), Paulette Dubost (Germaine) 

International Sales: Mk2

US Distributor: Janus Film • janusfilms.com

 

COLCOA is proud to present the North American Premiere of this digitally restored classic, a poignant tale of broken lives and fractured allegiances set in Nazi occupied France. Headstrong Marion Steiner runs Theatre Montmartre – a popular refuge as much for having heating as for the plays – in the absence of her husband Lucas, a Jew who has gone underground for fear of deportation. Paris is a dangerous place. Even missing the last metro could result in a curfew violation and a one-way trip to prison camp. Everyone, including Marion, is muddling through it by rehearsing Lucas’s recent play, La Disparue. Marion casts Bernard in the lead opposite herself, and the young upstart is soon casting a lustful eye on all the women of the troupe. Much like France herself, however, Marion and Bernard are leading dual lives. Both are keeping secrets from the Nazis that could get them shot, but it’s the secret they are keeping from each other that could prove their real undoing.

 

From his early days as a firebrand critic for Cahiers du cinéma, writer/director François Truffaut was synonymous with the French New Wave. He blasted onto the scene with The 400 Blows (1959), and consolidated his reputation with Jules and Jim (1962). Having lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris, Truffaut had always wanted to capture something of that experience in a film. He got his chance with the second installment of a trilogy he was working on about the theatrical arts. The first of the three, Day For Night (1973), was an effusive portrayal of the filmmaking process as a metaphor for life’s travails. With The Last Metro, Truffaut used a theater as a visual means to mediate between the public and the private sides of his characters. Collaborating with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean-Claude Grumberg, The Last Metro became his most lavish production, and his greatest success, scooping all the major César Awards and garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. Truffaut envisaged completing the trilogy with a film dedicated to the lost world of Vaudeville, but the script, L'Agence magic, went unfilmed after a series of setbacks forced him to seek more commercial projects. This digital restoration was made with the support of the Franco-American Cultural Fund.

 

Quotes:

“…a dazzlingly subversive work.”

– Vincent Canby NEW YORK TIMES

“In one of French cinema's most celebrated screen partnerships, Depardieu and Deneuve complement one another perfectly.”

– James Travers FRENCH FILM SITE