Set in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1942, the film follows the fortunes of a small theatre in the Montmartre quarter which keeps up passive resistance by maintaining its cultural integrity, despite censorship, antisemitism and material shortages. The title evokes two salient facts of city life under the Germans: fuel shortages led people to spend their evenings in theatres and other places of entertainment, but the curfew meant they had to catch the last Métro train home.
👉 The Last Metro in the context of Francois Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut (UK: /ˈtruːfoʊ,ˈtrʊ-/TROO-foh, TRUU-, US: /truːˈfoʊ/troo-FOH; French:[fʁɑ̃swaʁɔlɑ̃tʁyfo]; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a young man and was hired to write for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, where he became a proponent of the auteur theory, which posits that a film's director is its true author. The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter-ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave. Truffaut supplied the story for another milestone of the movement, Breathless (1960), directed by his Cahiers colleague Jean-Luc Godard.