“It takes two to love, as it takes two to hate. And I will keep loving you, in spite of yourself. My heart beats faster when I think of you. Nothing else matters.

‘The Last Metro’, directed by François Truffaut in 1980, is a French historical drama starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. Deneuve plays Marion Steiner, the wife of a theatre director who runs a company in Montmartre during the Nazi occupation. She casts Bernard Granger, played by Depardieu, in a play, but Granger and she form a romantic attachment. In the meantime, her Jewish husband is hiding from the Nazis in the basement of the theatre. It’s a picturesque, rich presentation of Paris during the occupation, as much about the theatre and the details of the plays production as it is about occupation and resistance. Much like Truffaut’s earlier film ‘Day For Night’, this film uses the setting to dissect the drama of performance. Granger, simultaneously an actor and a resistance fighter, embodies this tension between performance in life and on the stage, whereas Steiner resists in a more covert, less direct way, by concealing her husband and ensuring that the play continues to be staged. There is something about the geography of the theatre, a sense of claustrophobia and enclosed but pervasive historical detail, that lifts this film above others. For me, this film is at the other end of the spectrum to Marcel Carné’s ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’, a film about theatre, history and resistance that was made during the war.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s an evocative and witty film. Watch in a suitable double bill with ‘Day For Night’, or a more interesting one with ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’.