Geoffrey H. Hartman
THE DUBIOUS CHARM OF M. TRUFFAUT
How difficult it is for the French to come to grips with the
Occupation, even so long after the event! That is the first impression
one receives from the aesthetic distance, the glassy, antiseptic touch,
with which sensitive matters of collaboration and anti-Semitism
were treated in Truffaut's
The Last Metro.
Though set in occupied
Paris, and focusing on the plight of Jews trapped there by Vichy
sympathizers and the Gestapo, the film remains curiously un–
threatening and apolitical. One is tempted to raise the question of
Truffaut's aestheticization of politics.
But as the film takes hold, one is obliged to modify that ques–
tion. Truffaut's gift for lyric clarity seems almost a byproduct of the
impermeable presence of Catherine Deneuve, who, as Marion
Steiner, plays the role of the wife of a Jewish theater owner in
danger of being deported. As the star of the film, Deneuve is a regis–
ter separating by perceptible yet fine modulations a series of closely
adjacent and vibrant emotions. There is, always, sexual attraction;
there is fierce and loyal dedication to the Jewish husband whom she
hides and looks after; there is the cold calculation that enables her to
continue his Theatre de Montmartre under the nose of the Jew–
hating Daxiat; there is, finally, her training as an actress which
enables her to remain formal, even haughty, whatever she actually
feels. Truffaut communicates a temperament at once passionate and
inviolable. The entire movie participates in Deneuve's makeup; it is
porcelaine de Paris;
and the medium of film gives merely an extra gloss
to the sense that everything in Paris is an extension of Deneuve and
her kind of theater, despite the trivial "Norwegian" (i.e., Nordic,
non-Jewish) or pseudo-Ibsenian play being rehearsed during the
film.
As if by a magic wave of the wand, there are no victims. We
know they exist, and a couple of scenes remind us of their suffering;
yet the action is
determined
by people who are, or feel they are, on
stage. Truffaut takes sides, ofcourse, but he does not judge. The col–
laborationist villains not only do not occupy center stage, they are
overstylized. Yet the good people too are reduced by a silhouette–
effect that either aestheticizes or eroticizes the action. It is as if the
Homeric gods, who do look down occasionally, were still disposing
