MELODRAMA AND HISTORY

...The Last Metro borrows the routine imagery of the genre, in which a swastika on a flag or an armband, or even an exceptionally well-shined pair of boots, is enough to put our sympathies where they belong...

...A very temperate and unenchanted realism pervades these final moments, for all their theatrical magic...

...We are first shown newsreel-footage of the liberation, with a rapid summary of the fate of every minor character...

...He has been the most memorable of all the minor characters, and Truffaut's documentary summary contains a glimpse of him in flight from the guns of the resistance...

...It was a play after all, Steiner's first great success after the war, starring Marion and Bernard...

...The love Marion and Bernard knew, however, belongs for both to an inadmissable past...

...Between Marion and Steiner, their bond of endurance has become so fast that even Bernard, were he given the chance, would prefer not to break it, and rather say that his love never existed...

...In neither film does the drama rehearsed by the actors comment unexpectedly on the story that Truffaut tells: but war, and especially was for the people of an occupied city, opens up vast areas of possible deception, and in every life forges a link between deception and survival, so that acting becomes almost as important as action...

...The story is a love triangle...

...Not long after she will make love to him on the floor of his dressing room...

...His narrator tells us that Daxiat went on to an ordinary life and died of cancer...

...and I think the details are worth recalling, to illustrate what pains he took in guiding the interpretation he wanted...

...As he does so, he looks neither mischievous nor ironic, but thoughtful, curious, scientific, as an artist is...

...A further touch of modesty, which becomes tremendously moving as one thinks about it, is The Last Metro's treatment of Jews...

...To her plea for special treatment Marion gives an equivocal answer, but we see the girl a second time, in the audience, her yellow star artfully covered by a sash...

...Out for an evening with her friends, she dashes off with a man she picked up a moment before, at a cabaret frequented by German officers...

...He sets the pace better than other directors, and he varies it better...

...After a quiet second or two, Truffaut cuts to something else...

...The most interesting moment in the film is one of Marion's visits to the cellar, when she discovers Steiner putting on a false nose and peering into a closet-mirror, because, he says, after all this time he wants to see what it feels like to be a Jew...

...When the Nazis have gone away with Marion and the two men are alone, Steiner turns to Bernard, and we expect any number of plausible gambits...

...Even as a victim, however, we do not altogether love him or forgive his manner...

...Truffaut makes us regard life in such conditions as a naturally moral subject, without satisfying us that its moments were therefore uniformly momentous...

...How will he end...

...All these commonplace devices, however, he employs for his own ends, and The Last Metro is attached to its parent films both in homage and as an act of criticism...

...during the war his wife produces—and surely, was con485 strained to produce—an inoffensive melodrama, while below-board he plans sets for a version of The Magic Mountain...

...But he is a man who never draws very near the brink of self-pity—his self-knowledge is too great for that —and the result is that he seems to ask of us not pity but understanding...

...but, as she leaves the room, we see his face averted, and realize that he has told a lie for Steiner's sake...

...The choice of Catherine Deneuve to play Marion Steiner was a bold piece of casting, and its success is a finer thing than the success of innumerable warm-hearted adepts in kindred roles...

...He is fussy, touchy, but masculine, completely intent on his art, and undeterred by anything that may stand in its way...

...But here the gestures are deepened by all that we see of Marion's relationship to Lucas Steiner...

...but what he says is, "My wife loves you...

...What does remain ambiguous is the sensation we feel in recognizing all this...

...Plainly they do not belong to Truffaut's story...

...In the circumstances it may be better to aim for less—simply to establish that the imagined artist's work is there, and to exhibit the effect it has on others...

...It educates the viewer whose ideal film is Casablanca and brings him, by an unemphatic irony, by pauses and deflections, a degree closer to the viewer whose ideal film is Jules and Jim...

...Truffaut thus keeps the melodramatic contract, for the sake of a style the audience identifies with the authentic tone of a period...

...he rebuffs her completely, saying that he never has loved her, and never can...

...It happens near the end of the story...

...The question now becomes, will Marion go back to her husband...

...The answer in this instance is that Truffaut's setting is not all Paris but a certain theater...

...Before the narrator breaks the interruption with his "Back to our story," we see Steiner creeping along a stone wall in a by-alley, dodging machinegun bullets: just what became of him there is left uncertain...

...But a curtain goes down on the whole scene...

...Do you love her...

...His solution is to place Jews at the outer edge of the story, and of the camera's interest—to make sure nevertheless that we know who they are—and then leave us to our thoughts...

...but our authoritative cue is in the play itself...

...His seems to me the Tolstoyan feeling about crisis, and about the common gifts by which we survive it—deplorable perhaps, but helpful to a storyteller...

...Some people have thought this ambiguous, or found in it a suggestion that Marion is still divided between the two...

...The group around Steiner's theater find that what were once practical or professional decisions have now taken on moral significance...

...But then a different reaction sets in: one starts to think about the choices that faced Truffaut, and to see the very circumscribed idea he gives of Steiner's practice as a triumph of modesty and cunning...

...that his characters are not representative Nazis, Jews, or Parisians, but the friends and enemies of the theater...

...Marion, the belief that she was loved...

...Marion Steiner is built after a recognizable type, the good and forbearing wife who mans the fort in hard times, and can draw on mysterious reserves in doing so: when the rifle-butt raps on the door, she alone will stop her husband from giving up...

...A more cynical modern ending would leave him a millionaire after the war...

...Marion has gone back to Steiner—has been sent back...

...That, by my count, is in the year 1942, and that is all...

...Lucas Steiner, a Jewish theater manager and director, is forced, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, to hide in the basement of his own theater...

...One feels a little cheated by this...

...The one obvious defect of the plot has to do with the character of Steiner's art...

...At the same time she takes charge of the theater, appeases a collaborationist newspaper critic whose judgment has become suddenly important, acquires a leading man, Bernard Granger, for her new production, and helps Steiner to direct the play in secret, by means of an auditor's channel from stage to basement through which he hears every line of the company's rehearsals...

...Bernard and Marion fall in love, but both remain essen tially loyal to Steiner, and at the end, after the war but still on stage, all three are seen reunited...

...The Gestapo have begun to search the theater from top to bottom...

...he could have been conceived only by a sympathy as vivid and assured as Truffaut's, and a humanity so full that it needs no proof...

...That's not what the war looked like," they can say, fortified by open-air adventures with expensive cinematography...

...This is the first Jew I can remember from a war picture who does not seem a tissue of humanitarian slogans animated by one actor's faith...

...TRUFFAUT ENDS HIS FILM in the most perfect way imaginable, but here he seems to have been widely misconstrued...

...and the director of films portraying a director of plays has to answer for the truth, substance, and originality of two separate productions...

...Bernard has joined them for this production, as per(continued on page 494) 486 (continued from page 486) haps he will in the future for others...

...These qualities make his admirers partial: what Truffaut cannot do strikes them for that reason as less worth doing...

...but Truffaut, by a conspiracy of intelligence with his lead actor, Heinz Benent, persuades us of Steiner's genius and of his pride as an individual Jew, till these facts seem wrought into the very lines of his face...

...and in his basement room, swept clear of furniture and all other signs of habitation, Steiner is caught in a familiar dramatic posture, concealed behind a partition with his wife's lover...

...What would be lost is a curious outrush of interest and sympathy, which, because it had no prompting, seems as we feel it to be our own...

...nor is Steiner exempted, having heard the rehearsals from his little room and spoken his question to Bernard...

...Why are we not shown Nazis, Jews, and traitors, in sufficiently impressive numbers, doing and suffering as the records tell us they did...

...It would once have been possible to watch a film of this sort without minding the omission...

...BUT THE DRAMATIC ENERGIES of The Last Metro center on a character whom we see only a few times, Lucas Steiner...

...Thus our first knowledge of Marion Steiner comes from an overheard conversation, in which she refuses work to a Jew, the more efficiently to protect one Jew...

...Evidently he belongs to the high theatrical milieu in which Cocteau and Giraudoux were preeminent...

...ness, his intelligence, his authority in matchini images with words, or using them to surprise eact other, and his unrelaxed interest in the progress of a story...

...The novelist whose hero is a great poet has to write his great poems...

...Her honor having been insulted by a review, and then gallantly defended by Bernard, she slaps him in the face because his show of valor might be read as a defiance of the Nazis...

...Yet their conduct remains to them a matter of adjusting to the daily circumstance—not of bringing their whole lives into accord with the outcome of systematic reflection...

...Similarly, for those whose knowledge is neither first-hand nor from books, World War II was largely an invention of Casablanca, Five Graves to Cairo, and the countless other films about principled opportunists who salvage an outpost of resistance here and there...

...By effortless imaginings Truffaut was freed for the work of a psychologist...

...With its serious portrait of artists at work, The Last Metro makes good on the promise of Day for Night...

...And the same is true of our final view of Daxiat, the right-wing journalistic hack, coarse, bullying, and pathetic, whom a new system raised for a while to the power of cultural arbiter...

...Truffaut looks on both only as irrefutable premises, and his love of chance proclaims his love of truth...

...Later she is confronted by a girl of fifteen, already bent on pursuing a career in the theater and eager to attend the new play—but forbidden as a Jew...

...For each character has renounced something: Bernard, a woman he loved...

...how she stands by him, with an intellectual admiration and moral respect that are as great as love, but not the same as love...

...These gestures are familiar at first, from the women of Truffaut's earlier films...

...This film offers nothing of the sound propaganda of retrospect...

...Truffaut leaves her there...

...But what of the thousand nameless ones, whom we feel it a crime to ignore now that their story is known...

...But he was inventing almost two generations after the event, and knew that though we do not think of them often, and will hardly condemn ourselves for failing to do so, we cannot help feeling that when associated subjects are before us this had better not be evaded...

...he is seriously wounded, but on the way to recovery, and she again declares her love...

...too disenchanted a portrait of an artist, in which vanity predominated over genius, would have ruined it twice...

...In this sense there was nothing paradoxical about Wilde's remark that "The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac...

...But :hese are the cheap rewards of a genre in its pure state, and again Truffaut's polite refusal is characteristic...

...Truffaut wants us to accept his film with the same tact, as a record of people in a particular situation, and not as an effort to come to terms with a great historical subject...

...and even now, for Truffaut to have given them a subplot would have robbed his film of all conviction...

...Our education begins with Truffaut's willingness to grant a human complexity to the heroine...

...The story when we return to it has Marion visiting Bernard in a hospital...

...yet even after the liberation, what he appears to have done is still another melodrama...

...To guard against that, it even has the texture of a '40s studio melodrama— something the ordinary viewer likes, though again our moralists are troubled by it...

...This Truffaut does brilliantly, with a minimum of strain...

...But the language we recognize as true to life 484 is never the same as the language we recognize as true for art: the latter depends entirely on which conventions get to us first...

...how the impatience with which he receives her smallest kindness, the artist's egotism that he nurses the more irritably for his isolation, add to her burden and estrange her affections in a way she can never reveal to anyone...

...After all, genius gives a poor idea of genius, when the effort is really made...

...Steiner is of course a special case...

...Besides, he gives Steiner an impressive scene that has implications for his art, and in which he upsets the melodrama of everyday life...

...That small surprise of the genuine was available to The Last Metro because from the first it was no less conscious of history than it was of the history of an art...

...There is something in him, apart from his strength of endurance, that warns us away...

...It is not quite so fine as Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, The Wild Child, or Adele H, but it shares their spirit...

...But good things while we are caring for them all exist by exclusion, and I admit The Last Metro has made me exclusive again...

...Marion receives the applause, first hesitantly, with a brief smile, then calmly, with a generous one, and joins hands with the two men...

...not war, not his dearest friend, dare trouble his labors, on pain of suffering his immediate indifference or his death, an equally satisfactory revenge...

...All this part, down to the narrator's tone of voice, is strongly reminiscent of Jules and Jim...

...He shows, for example, how the infection of antiSemitism leaves its mark even on Steiner, whose marriage to a beautiful Frenchwoman has become part of his secret pride as well as his suffering: in certain moods, just like his persecutors, he regards his possession of Marion as a kind of theft...

...The straight melodramatic convention dictates that he be tried as a collaborator and found guilty...

...This circumstance gives The Last Metro its depth...

...we know her probable fate and nothing would be gained by reporting it...

...But Truffaut shows Marion Steiner taxed beyond her reserves, and, while we ponder the strangeness of this, manages to suggest that her vagrant passions are not just a release from the fears of the moment but an extension of her ordinary self...

...494...

...Memories of Jules and Jim may have given the cue to the latter reading...

...Such fidelity to the given is supposed to be a strength for all works not written a thèse, but in fact it disappoints a large part of the intellectual audience...

...that his subject is not the Occupation, or the Holocaust, but a time when for these people the realities of ambition and performance were modified by the realities of betrayal and arrest...

...A sentimental portrait of a Jew would have ruined the film...

...and when they find it, in any but a thoroughly brutal and somehow "out-of-bounds" film like Seven Beauties, they wonder why their history cannot be moralized...

...His wife Marion, who is not Jewish, and whose great beauty and dignity on stage have made her unassailable, attends to his needs...