Le Dernier Metrohas been criticised for presenting a vision of the Occupation years that is inappropriately 'comforting and comfortable' do you agree? What aspects of the Occupation period does Truffaut's film emphasize, and how?

The first 200 words of this essay...

Le Dernier Metro has been criticised for presenting a vision of the Occupation years that is inappropriately 'comforting and comfortable' do you agree? What aspects of the Occupation period does Truffaut's film emphasize, and how?

The key features of Truffaut's film, according to Joy Gould Boyum, 'make for a comforting and comfortable vision: of life, of the theatre, of the occupation'1. Such criticism appeared on numerous occasions after the release of The Last Metro and while such reactions can be explained, they are not, in my opinion, justified. It is clear that Boyum, like many American critics, missed the central point of the film by focusing too much on a political motif that was obviously not central to Truffaut's portraying of the Occupation years. The Last Metro was never meant to be a controversial political work or a vehement socio-historical attack on the traditional myths of wartime France.

The main reason why Truffaut's film was often judged to present too optimistic a vision of the Occupation period is the unfavorable context in which the film was released. Indeed, as Affron and Rubinstein (1993) make clear, a lineage of very strong and disturbing films had been written