In this episode of Fascism on Film, we turn to François Truffaut’s The Last Metro, a film set inside a Paris theater under Nazi occupation. As curfews fall and artists disappear, the stage becomes both refuge and trap. Catherine Deneuve stars as Marion Steiner, an actress trying to run her Jewish husband’s theater while secretly hiding him in the basement below. Above ground, rehearsals continue; underground, he directs in secret through an air vent, shaping the play that keeps them both alive.

We talk about Truffaut’s mastery of tension and his ability to build Hitchcock-like suspense without gunfire, using the rituals of theater and performance to show how fascism infiltrates ordinary life. The film’s world is one of masks and survival. Actors perform onstage, backstage, and in public life, each concealing what could cost them everything.

We also explore the film’s moral spectrum, from quiet cooperation to open collaboration. The critic Daxiat embodies the seduction of power and the everyday cruelty of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the troupe’s survival becomes its own form of resistance, a reminder that sometimes enduring under oppression is itself an act of defiance.

The Last Metro is both love story and political allegory, a portrait of how art persists under tyranny. It asks what it means to stay human when every gesture must be performed for survival, and what hope can look like when the lights finally come back on.