The Last Metro · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man in a cellar holds his ear to a heating duct. Above him, actors are rehearsing his play. He hears everything and sees nothing. When he has a note he writes it on a scrap of paper and gives it to his wife, who carries it up the stairs and delivers it to the company as her own.

That is Lucas Steiner: Jewish, forbidden to work, officially fled to South America, actually living underneath his own theater in occupied Paris while Marion runs the Théâtre Montmartre and stands in for him in public. Truffaut builds the entire film out of that duct. Stage above, hidden man below, sound going down, instructions coming back up.

The first useful thing Deleuze offers here is a distinction about what lies outside a shot. Following Bazin, he insists a frame is never just a rectangle. It is a cut into a larger world, and it always implies what it excludes. He splits that out-of-field in two. There is the relative kind — the wings, the corridor, the room next door, somewhere you could walk to. And there is the absolute kind: a pressure with no location at all, which the image registers but can never contain.

Lucas in his cellar is the relative out-of-field made audible. The editing alternates cellar and stage, cellar and stage, and that rhythm is how you learn the building; Martine Barraqué's cutting is unemphatic and continuity-driven, so the theater's map assembles itself out of juxtaposition rather than establishing shots. Néstor Almendros gives the two zones different light. Stage and dressing rooms burn amber and gold, as though lit by footlights and dressing-room bulbs. The cellar is cool and dark, lit as confinement. You always know which side of the duct you are on.

The absolute out-of-field is the Occupation, and it is in the title. Not a tank. A train. The curfew and the last métro of the evening decide when a performance must end and when everyone has to be off the street, and the film treats the transit timetable as the invisible clock governing every scene. Notice how the opening handles this: a voice-over lays down compressed historical fact over documentary-style period images, buying the film license to keep those facts offscreen for the next two hours. Thereafter the occupier arrives as a schedule, a regulation, and a critic — Daxiat, played by Truffaut's old co-writer Jean-Louis Richard. This is exactly what the film has been attacked for, an Occupation approached at the level of what a company cannot do after eleven o'clock. Hold the complaint. The obliquity is doing work.

Deleuze calls the frame a closed set, a system whose information is organized by its borders, and Truffaut's decisive production choice was to make one physically. Rather than rent a working playhouse, he converted a disused space in the 9th arrondissement so that auditorium, corridors, dressing rooms and cellar existed as one continuous, controllable geography. The camera then moves through it in sustained takes, wings to corridor to dressing room, so the architecture is learned kinesthetically. Bazin's old opposition helps: a stage is centripetal, everything pressing inward toward the players, while a screen is centrifugal, a mask cropping a world that keeps going past the edges. Truffaut aims a centrifugal instrument at a centripetal box. The result is a building that feels sealed and permeable at the same time, where every dangerous thing is a question of who is allowed into which room.

Deleuze's term for images built out of relations rather than acts is the relation-image, and his exemplar is Hitchcock, whose real invention, he argues, was to include the spectator inside the film — not identifying with anyone, but holding a relation no character holds whole. Truffaut spent 1966 dismantling that mechanism in an interview book with Hitchcock himself, and Notorious is the model he redeploys: a woman performing a public role, glossy star lighting, the secret kept literally in a cellar. Almost nothing in The Last Metro is frightening in itself. A door opening is frightening because you know what is behind a different door. Deleuze would call the duct the film's symbol, the single object that condenses its organizing relation: in this building everything travels except the person.

Almendros photographs Deneuve with a controlled, sculptural key that quotes 1940s studio glamour. This looks like flattery and isn't. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, uses "gest" for a bodily attitude that makes a social relation visible rather than expressing a private feeling. Marion's composure is her cover story, and the lighting does not record the performance, it performs it.

Bernard, meanwhile, is quietly working for the Resistance. Deleuze separates the large form of the action-image, where an enormous situation presses until a decisive act transforms it, from the small form, where a modest act discloses a situation we could not see. The elliptical gesture pointing at an unseen situation he calls an index of lack. Depardieu's character is almost nothing but such indices. That is how the film manages to be a Resistance film with no Resistance plot, and how it avoids both claiming France resisted and claiming it didn't.

The love story is settled on a stage, in a curtain call: the reveal is staged rather than narrated. Deleuze's crystal-image names the moment an actual thing and its virtual double stop being separable, the reflection and the reflected trading places, and his home case for it is Renoir, specifically The Golden Coach, where an actress torn among suitors can only be resolved inside a proscenium. Truffaut takes the device intact. But Deleuze's point about Renoir is that his crystals are always cracked, that there is a flaw in the mirror through which something escapes toward life. Here the crack runs through the film's light. The amber theater is nearly a sealed world with its own economy and weather; the grey, diffuse, near-documentary Paris outside keeps it from closing over. And there is a man in the foundations.

The younger French critics were right that this is a well-made film, which is funny, since as a critic Truffaut made his name attacking the well-made French screenplay. Here he assembles one deliberately, out of parts he can name: Carné's vertical playhouse from Children of Paradise, Lubitsch's troupe-under-occupation engine from To Be or Not to Be with the jokes removed and restricted narration in their place, Renoir's braided cutting between strata in The Rules of the Game and his refusal to nominate a villain, Mankiewicz's voice-over prologue and dressing-rooms-as-real-power from All About Eve. The Carné debt is not only formal. Children of Paradise was shot under the Occupation with Trauner and Kosma working in hiding, kept off the credits. A man making a film he cannot sign, from a place he cannot be seen.

Take that back into the movie. Deleuze uses "fabulation" for story-telling as a political act, the making of a legend when the people it belongs to do not exist yet or no longer do. After Ophüls and Malle had demolished the story of a nation of resisters, Truffaut did not document a people. He invented a small one, a company, and built its legend out of the actual conditions under which the films he loved were made. The duct is a memory device.

So watch it again and ask who in that building is not performing. I don't think there is anyone.