The Last Metro

Director: François Truffaut

1980 / 131min / 35mm

During the years of the German occupation of Paris, a Montmartre theater company—including womanizing new recruit Gérard Depardieu and leading lady/manager Catherine Deneuve, whose Jewish husband has gone into hiding in the theater’s basement—struggle to maintain a measure of artistic independence while facing a takeover attempt by an anti-Semitic drama critic. A companion piece of sorts to Truffaut’s 1973 Day for Night, as evidently besotted of backstage camaraderie and chaos as his earlier film was of the on-set varietals, the period romance The Last Metro was one of the director’s most commercially and critically acclaimed works, taking home a whopping 10 César Awards.