Show People

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE LAST METRO Directed by Frangois Truffaut Screenplay by Frangois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean-Claude Grumberg Here Francois Truffaut does for theater people what he did for film folk in 1973's Day for Night: he makes charming sense of their idiosyncrasies in a story that combines amused tolerance for their odd ways with a tender regard for their idealism. The earlier film showed how a movie company on location seals itself off from the outside world and creates its own vivid reality. The Last Metro focuses on a theatrical company trying to operate in German-occupied Paris during World War II while surrounded by Gestapo agents, censors, black-marketeers--an external reality too insistently harsh to be so easily avoided.

The company's resident genius, Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), is Jewish and has gone underground--literally. His actress-wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) has fixed up a secret apartment for him beneath the theater's stage. Steiner listens to rehearsals and directs a new production by giving his notes to his wife during her nightly visits. By day, she tries to cope with her bumptious leading man (Gerard Depardieu), who is involved in the Resistance, and the affection that grows between them almost unconsciously. The chief menace is a smart, epicene drama critic and Nazi collaborator who senses the supposedly exiled Steiner may be near at hand.

What protects the company is its members' innocence. Aside from Marion, none knows of Steiner's substage presence. But a larger innocence is also at work: theatrical unworldliness. There may be a war on, but the ambitious little ingenue is still trying to advance her career by fair means or foul; Depardieu has to try to bed the costume designer; and Deneuve's attentions are divided between her inconvenient connubial obligations and her need to preserve her image and her threatened theater. Such preoccupations armor them against the ugliness of life under the Nazis. They will do what they imagine God put them on earth to do, which is to practice their art.

Like all obsessives, they are at once silly and brave. They are also--without alluding to it--very honorable in their refusal to allow perverse authority to interfere with their art. The play that absorbs them may or may not be any good; they think it is, and that is what matters.

Deneuve, more beautiful than ever, displays a knowing humanity, and a sensuality she rarely shows in film, where she has been used more as icon than actress. When she and Depardieu finally acknowledge their passion for each other, there is a sheer eroticism--without so much as a button being unbuttoned--that one finds in few movie love scenes.

Throughout, the film is wise and funny, and uninsistently, even casually, profound in what it has to say about the perdurability of art. --By Richard Schickel

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