A Late-Career Truffaut in Winston-Salem

Bright and early on Saturday morning, a/perture cinema in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, will screen François Truffaut’s 1980 film The Last Metro, as part of the season-long introductory series The Art of French Cinema, hosted by Fernando Pardo, a French-language instructor at Salem College and Wake Forest University. With this backstage period piece, the filmmaker brilliantly conjured the Paris of his youth, telling the story of a theater company soldiering on under the German occupation. The Last Metro became the greatest popular and critical success of Truffaut’s later years, and it stands as a moving tribute to the value of resistance and the power of art, as well as a showcase for the talents of its two leads, Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, who play the stars of Théâtre Montmartre’s latest production. Those in attendance at the a/perture screening will have an opportunity to give voice to their own impressions of Truffaut’s stirring melodrama: admission includes a postscreening discussion, as well as coffee and pastries.