During the years of the occupation, theatres and cinemas flourished in Paris. In December 1942 for example, some 800,000 Parisians attended plays and musicals, whilst in 1943 there were some 300 million film-goers nationally. [29] In these dark times audiences were clearly determined to be entertained, but what of the experiences of those who worked in the arts? Made in 1980, François Truffaut’s highly romanticised The Last Metro/Le Dernier metro goes back to 1942 for its story of the Montmartre Theatre in Paris, which is being run by its glamorous lead actress Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve). Her Jewish husband (Heinz Bennent) is supposed to have fled abroad: he’s actually hiding in the basement, waiting to be smuggled into the Free Zone, which is on the verge of being taken over by German forces.
In its portrayal of a stage company during the occupation, The Last Metro, whose title refers to the post-theatre curfew in Paris, does consider the responsibilities of artists during wartime. Is it their primary role to keep working and entertaining their paying customers? Or should they be actively seeking ways of challenging the censorship imposed by the authorities, here embodied by the collaborationist critic and writer Daxiat (Maurice Risch)?
The Resistance plays a shadowy role in The Last Metro, which turned out to be an enormous box-office success: Bernard (Gerard Depardieu), one of the troupe’s main actors, has connections to the underground and towards the end of the film goes off to work for the movement full-time, a decision which angers Deneuve’s Marion. Earlier Bernard suffers a close-call at a rendezvous at a church, where only the hand gesture of a fellow resistant stops him from being arrested.
Although Truffaut includes plenty of period details – such as the German decision to target theatres in their quest to find ‘volunteer’ young men for labour – he seems more interested in the play-within-a-play device and in the romantic entanglements of his fictional actors rather than their moral choices. Moreover this privileged, self-enclosed world seems an unconvincing metaphor for the wider national experience.
More interesting in this context is Bertrand Tavernier’s Laissez-passer, a sprawling 2002 epic about the conduct of French filmmakers during World War 2. (The title refers to the ‘safe conduct’ pass granted by Germans, permitting French citizens to travel, and also to the lyrics of a song which plays over the opening credits, ‘Laissez passer le temps, laissez passer les jours, mais pas la vie… pas l’amour’.) [30] Tavernier compares and contrasts two real-life individuals with very different personalities and temperaments. On the one hand there’s the screenwriter Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydes) who’s juggling various girlfriends and mistresses, and who is determined to avoid working for the German-financed and controlled production company Continental Films, where the intimidating Nazi boss is Alfred Greven (Christian Berkel). And on the other there is Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), an assistant director at Continental, who works “under, not for, the Germans”. Married with a small child, and an ex-World War 1 cavalry officer, Devaivre is also an active member of the Resistance. “I just want them out,” is his attitude to the occupying troops, and in the film’s most memorable sequence, he travels all the way to London carrying a secret file. Interrogated by British agents over endless cups of tea, the flu-ridden Devaivre is parachuted back into France with the most basic of training the same day.
Laissez-passer praises the defiance of both its leading men, whether it’s the intellectual stance of Aurenche, refusing to allow his written work to be used for propaganda, or the practical resistance of Devaivre and his wife (Marie Desgranges). The film doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of these years: the Allied bombing raids that hit civilian areas, the food shortages and the anti-Semitic measures that barred Jews from employment, whilst Devaivre’s brother-in-law is deported simply for possessing a banned pamphlet. However, the portrayal of the Resistance is surprisingly old-fashioned, compared to, say, The Army in the Shadows: here resistants bomb trains rather than liquidate traitors. An interesting footnote was that Aurenche was savagely criticised by the young François Truffaut in Cahiers du Cinéma in the early 1950s for the staidness of his literary adaptations: he was the epitome of ‘le cinéma de qualité’, which Truffaut so denounced.
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