Truffaut's best??

The title derives from the curfew in German occupied Paris when all the inhabitants had to scurry to catch the last metro to get home at 11-0-clock to avoid arrest. The film is about a theatre whose director Jewish Lucas Steiner (Heinz Benent)has supposedly fled the country to escape Nazi persucution. In reality his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) is hiding him in the cellar of the theatre. They are about to put on a new play and to keep from going stir-crazy Steiner gets the idea of directing the show by listening to rehearsals through an air duct in the basement. The leads in the play (and the film) are played by Marion and Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu) and as they develop their roles in the play they gradually fall in love in real life. We discover that not only is Marion breaking Nazi law by hiding a Jew but Granger belongs to the resistance and is blowing up Nazi VIPs. As they fall in love the the threat from the Nazis grows. The Gestapo arrest Granger?s collaborator and the police gradually get nearer to discovering Steiner in the cellar and at the same time the theatre itself is menaced by a take over from an anti-semitic journalist named Daxiat (Jean Louis Richard).

The acting is impressive right down to the bit parts and all the elements seem to make for this film being an impressive nail-biter yet Truffaut makes it a curiously undramatic movie, he prefers to focus only on the characters of the protagonists and their reactions to the threats building up around them. It starts and ends in documentary style with little maps showing what was happening during the war. In the body of the film there are no histrionics, no over the top dramatics, no stunts, no special effects. It is like an early Hitchcock minus the big bang at the end.

When it came out in 1980 it was very popular in France, in fact Truffaut?s most popular movie. It won 10 Cesars (French Oscars) and yet personally I don?t think it comes close to Les 400 Coups or Jules et Jim.