2005-02-09 01:51:54尚未設定
The Last Metro
(reviewed on 31/1/05)
The Last Metro (Le Dernier metro; 最後一班地車)
year: 1980
country: France
directed by: Francois Truffaut
War-time Paris. Nazi occupation. Lovers on the hide. A story with the above plot elements could easily have been made into a tear-jerking war film. The brilliance of Francois Truffaut's 1980 movie, 'The Last Metro', owes a lot to the director's decision to tell an ordinary story instead of an epic. To make a decent film in the latter category, you only need to show what the war brings to the people and thus how they lose their love and suffer; to make a film totally down-to-earth, as in 'The Last Metro', you need a genuine storyteller at his best. And that's what you got here.
Sweeping the Cesar Awards of France by winning 10 prizes out of its 12 nominations, this film narrates an intricate love story in the midst of the Nazi occupation in Paris. Under the oppression of war, audiences retreat to drama theatres for their only solace. The same applies to a theatre director, Lucas Steiner (played by Heinz Bennent), who's a Jew and has to hide in the basement of his own theatre, and his wife, Marion (played by Catherine Deneuve), who is the star of the latest production. Completing the triangle is a flirty actor, Bernard Granger (played by Gerard Depardieu), who recently joins the cast as the lead of the play. Besides their everyday effort to make the performance a success, which is the only way to keep the theatre from closing down, the characters also need to deal with the complicated tentions between themselves, at times exquisitely displaying their reluctance to acknowledge their restrained passions for each other.
Viewers of French cinema should be able to observe the distinctly different approaches of Truffaut and Godard towards political notions in their films - while Godard indulged himself into political satires repeatedly, Truffaut seemed to have never intentionally posited his films in a vigorous political environment. Even in 'The Last Metro', a film that deals with the sensitive notion of Nazi occupation, Truffaut still manages to keep his cool and tell a humane love story instead of going on to exaggerate the brutality and beastliness of war, which most other directors would probably choose to. For instance, the film clearly does not retreats into sentimentality in its description of wartime struggles. A major delight in seeing Truffaut's productions may be his readiness in celebrating humanity, even during the worst of times.
Just as the film seems to be heading to a dead end towards its finale, 'The Last Metro' finds its way to settle the complicated relationship between its three protagonists in a masterfully directed scene, where the boundary between reality and fictional represention blurs, and where the two main themes - art and reality - of the film are drawn on again. Two decades after showing the world his unconventional talent during the French New Wave movement, Truffaut demonstrates yet again that he's one of the great storytellers of the cinema world.
rating: 7/10
The Last Metro (Le Dernier metro; 最後一班地車)
year: 1980
country: France
directed by: Francois Truffaut
War-time Paris. Nazi occupation. Lovers on the hide. A story with the above plot elements could easily have been made into a tear-jerking war film. The brilliance of Francois Truffaut's 1980 movie, 'The Last Metro', owes a lot to the director's decision to tell an ordinary story instead of an epic. To make a decent film in the latter category, you only need to show what the war brings to the people and thus how they lose their love and suffer; to make a film totally down-to-earth, as in 'The Last Metro', you need a genuine storyteller at his best. And that's what you got here.
Sweeping the Cesar Awards of France by winning 10 prizes out of its 12 nominations, this film narrates an intricate love story in the midst of the Nazi occupation in Paris. Under the oppression of war, audiences retreat to drama theatres for their only solace. The same applies to a theatre director, Lucas Steiner (played by Heinz Bennent), who's a Jew and has to hide in the basement of his own theatre, and his wife, Marion (played by Catherine Deneuve), who is the star of the latest production. Completing the triangle is a flirty actor, Bernard Granger (played by Gerard Depardieu), who recently joins the cast as the lead of the play. Besides their everyday effort to make the performance a success, which is the only way to keep the theatre from closing down, the characters also need to deal with the complicated tentions between themselves, at times exquisitely displaying their reluctance to acknowledge their restrained passions for each other.
Viewers of French cinema should be able to observe the distinctly different approaches of Truffaut and Godard towards political notions in their films - while Godard indulged himself into political satires repeatedly, Truffaut seemed to have never intentionally posited his films in a vigorous political environment. Even in 'The Last Metro', a film that deals with the sensitive notion of Nazi occupation, Truffaut still manages to keep his cool and tell a humane love story instead of going on to exaggerate the brutality and beastliness of war, which most other directors would probably choose to. For instance, the film clearly does not retreats into sentimentality in its description of wartime struggles. A major delight in seeing Truffaut's productions may be his readiness in celebrating humanity, even during the worst of times.
Just as the film seems to be heading to a dead end towards its finale, 'The Last Metro' finds its way to settle the complicated relationship between its three protagonists in a masterfully directed scene, where the boundary between reality and fictional represention blurs, and where the two main themes - art and reality - of the film are drawn on again. Two decades after showing the world his unconventional talent during the French New Wave movement, Truffaut demonstrates yet again that he's one of the great storytellers of the cinema world.
rating: 7/10