Discussion Post 10/13

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/11/movies/film-the-last-metro-melodrama-by-truffaut.html


This article, written during the release of Le Dernier Metro in 1980 provides a first hand view of the film during the time Truffaut was not only alive but still creating film. During a time when Truffaut’s other works were still fresh on the mind and the film scene was vastly different. In the 80s the French New Wave has just ended and “New Hollywood” had just begun. Directors from the experimental time had to chose to maintain for further their radical stances or to go with the times.
This article agrees with the sentiment Godard held, that Le Dernier Metro seems to blend more seamlessly with films of the time, abandoning some of the outright defiance of normality that Truffaut and fellow Auteurs were known for during the time. However certain aspects of Truffaut’s classic filmmaking such as odd camera angles or use of music and sound in a new way remains clearly prévenant in this film, even if he does embrace a more conventional narrative.

Another opinion this article takes is that this film is a bit too naive for its films grim subject matter.
There seems to be a glossing over of some of the more serious subject matters. And an isolation from the root of many of the issues which effect this film. This isolation is echoes by the theater as an insular setting. Truffaut justifies this as the nativity the film takes is similar to the nativity of children at the time, and particularly his own experience with the war which he could not have fully grasped in his childhood.