Occupational Performances in Truffaut’s The Last Metro

Abstract

Whereas Lacombe Lucien turned out to be a succès de scandale, François Truffaut’s The Last Metro, made six years later (1980), was rather a succès tout court, receiving acclaim from the general public, as well as from the critics. Henry Rousso ranks it among the top 120 box-office successes in France during the fifteen-year period between 1972 and 1987. Having carried off ten Césars (the Cannes film festival’s equivalent of the Oscar), as well as an Academy Award nomination in the United States, Truffaut’s film clearly belongs to a different era in the renewal of Occupation memories. It is a period less tormented by the past, in which esthetic issues took precedence over political concerns in discussions of the arts and critical theory. At a time when the Socialists were finally about to come to power (with Mitterrand taking office in 1981), a narrower brand of Leftist political criticism was paradoxically beginning to hold less sway over literary and film criticism. In feminist theory, advocacy of a politicized “feminine writing” of the body from such writers as Hélène Cixous was beginning to receive critical scrutiny for its essentialism, and various forms of Marxism were being attacked by the “New Philosophers” in the late 1970s. Given that The Last Metro’s sole villain, the theater critic Daxiat, is the one to declare that “everything is political,” it is easy to see that Truffaut delighted in taking a rancorous jab at Leftist critics of the late 1960s and 1970s who read literature and the arts through political grids.