Last Metro freezeframes

I recently rewatched Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980). Truffaut films contain moments of visual deja vu; images echo one another, a mirroring that refracts a moment from all angles. For example, Marion's (Catherine Denueve) hair: the spiral of Marion's chignon wraps tightly around her head, creating a sideways halo (top) as she leans in to kiss her husband. The scene fades to black on the  horseshoe shape her hair forms. The dimensions of tightly wound blond hair  are revisited in a later sequence (bottom). Marion sits before her vanity, the hair wound in a tight chignon; the same light brown shadow reappears, adding depth and contour to the coiled strands. The prominence of Marion's hair in these two shots link her in a long chain of sexual signification, namely, the dark potential concealed in the blond hair in Hitchcock's films.

In Vertigo (1958), Madeleine's (Kim Novak) chignon forms a tight vortex with no perceptible endpoint; the void recedes into a space that exists beyond and through the frame. The shadow that forms on her hair in the high key lighting further emphasizes the overwhelming effect of her bright blond hair. The opening sequence of Marnie (1964) conceals its protagonist's blondness; Tippi Hedren either places her back to the viewer or remains outside the frame. It is not until the last moment when Marnie's blond hair is revealed, as a reflection in the mirror after she has washed the last of the brown dye from it.

Like the changing of the scenery in the old theater where the majority of the film's action takes place (below), spaces take on new meanings as they change their relationship to one another.

 The vanity table reemerges as a space where the two men Marion desires, her husband and Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) are laid out among her other possessions. The transference of desire from unrealized to realized and back again is one of the central narrative themes that finds itself reflected and reworked throughout the film.