Lacombe Lucien

Lacombe Lucien is an understated yet complex story of innocence corrupted by war. Though commercially successful, the film was judged harshly in France by critics on the Left because of its non-judgmental stance toward collaboration. Indeed, the film offers no psychological interpretations but is content to simply show what happened in almost Bressonian fashion (Malle worked as an assistant with Bresson in producing a documentary).

Based on the childhood memories of Louis Malle, Lacombe Lucien tells the story of Lucien (Pierre Blaise) a rural French teenager who, having been rejected by the French resistance in 1944, joins with the German occupiers and becomes an enforcer. It is brilliant in its understated portrait of how self-interest and pride can lead to regrettable choices.

Lucien lives with his mother together with another man while his father remains a prisoner of war. With limited education and lacking sophistication, Lucien is angered when his desire to join the underground is rejected because of his youth. Instead, he opportunistically becomes a member of the German police and soon takes on the persona of a surly thug. Malle makes clear that Lucien is neither fundamentally good nor bad, but only becomes involved with the Gestapo through a series of accidental circumstances. Though the film implies that Lucien is attracted to the Gestapo as a means for an individual without status or power to achieve a sense of self worth, ultimately Lucien must take responsibility for his choice.

He becomes involved with Albert Horn (Holger Lowenadler), a wealthy Jewish tailor from Paris, his mother Bella (Therese Giehse) who has lived in an Eastern European ghetto, and his young daughter France (Aurore Clement) who is totally Parisian and uncomfortable with her Jewish heritage. Their relationship becomes the turning point for Lucien's struggle to come to grips with who he is and retain his humanity. Though I felt repelled by Lucien's actions during the film, I also sympathized with his plight and understood the circumstances that led to his corruption. I felt he was moving toward self-awareness before the end of the film.

Lacombe Lucien poses moral questions about the point that innocence and immorality meet, and with its almost matter-of-fact style, the powerful conclusion almost takes us unaware. I found the film to be gripping and heartfelt and I would strongly recommend it. Pierre Blaise, in his first acting role as Lucien, turns in a performance of raw power. Unfortunately he was killed just one year later in an auto accident at the age of 24.

Lucien, the provincial teenager who tries to join the resistance and when rejected becomes a Gestapo killer, may be more innocent and ignorant as well as more brutish than the average Frenchman of the occupation; but many French people must have fallen into collaboration like this. The period was rife with troubling complicity. Released at last in a fine US DVD version by Criterion Collection available with Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Goodbye, Children (1987), this rich, powerful work is not one for US film buffs to miss. This trio from Malle reveals him to be the New Wave's premier chronicler of the moral complexities and tragedies of the coming-of-age process.

For the lead role Malle found the remarkable Pierre Blaise, tragically killed in a car accident a year after release. A youth without previous acting experienced but with the provincial accent Malle couldn't find among professionals, Blaise combines the cherubic and the dangerous, the brutish and the sweetly innocent. Sullen yet ineluctably present, Blaise has great presence and essentially makes the film. In a French TV interview with Malle at the time still available online Malle says Blaise was compared with Delon. Blaise turned out to be "very, very gifted," Malle adds.

The atmosphere of this interview, incidentally, suggests that in some circles not everyone in France was as violently upset by or opposed to the film as we are now told. After all, Le Monde did hail Lacombe as a masterpiece initially, even if they recanted and called it "dangerous" later. "Dangerous" is a strange criticism for a film, a sort of backhanded flattery.

When considering the moral ambiguity of the piece, it's worth considering Allociné's commentary, which points out the following: "Malle adopted a Marxist approach in looking at the collaboration. He stated that his Lucien was inspired by Marx's concept of the lumpenproletariat as a social class with no choice other than to collaborate with the forces of repression because its members have no political culture available to them. Thus in the filmmaker's mind Lucien Labombe's enlistment in the militia was a choice determined not by ideology but by a need to gain material comfort and better his social position." This is in fact a classic "collabo" situation: while some supporters of the German occupation did so because of fascist, anti-Semitic beliefs, many more did it for expediency. It was the armée des ombres (to use Jean-Pierre Melville's title), the résistence "shadow army," whose members acted out of idealism. The determinism and sheer stupidity of Lucien's enlistment is underlined by the fact that it's late in the war: the Americans are coming, the Germans are losing, and the French resistance is inflicting daily casualties on the closest collaborators, as we see when Lucien's French Gestapo bosses get wounded and killed.

Lucien's lumpenproletariat helplessness couldn't be made clearer. Lucien begins with a job emptying bedpans. His father is prisoner of the Germans. His mother is living with another man and tells him not to come around any more. His prospects are grim. He has no status -- not even the comfort of parents. Though he's an ignorant boy, he has the solid (lumpen) physique of a man, and he also has a certain brutality: we see him kill first a small bird with a sling shot, then rabbits and chickens, and each time this is a gesture in response to being put down or rejected. Yet he has confidence. He asks his schoolteacher to take him into the maquis, but the man rejects him out of hand as too young, useless ("we have many like you"). By chance -- a tire blowout on his rickety bike -- he falls into a den of Gestapo collaborators. He's not daunted; he recognizes a bike champion among them and drinks with the men and with his tongue thus loosened, in an act of childish revenge whose dire consequences he probably doesn't know (and which are initially hidden from him), he informs on the teacher. He's soon taken to meet Albert Horn, an elegant Jewish tailor from Paris in hiding with his mother and daughter (Aurore Clément, intense in her first screen role). Horn makes a suit for Lucien, later another: they become his new uniform, an escape from his peasant identity and stepping stone to the power, status, and money that are why he's playing this deadly game.

On the way to the tailor in a collaborator's posh, sporty convertible, Malle brilliantly has Lucien try on a pair of big sunglasses -- which instantly transform him. By dint of this little gesture, the country bumpkin -- with his clear skin, rich wavy dark hair, and strong bone structure -- instantly becomes a blasé movie star. Coming of age in this film means sexiness, transformation, danger. Malle's teenagers all live in adult worlds of moral transgression but retain the prettiness and innocence of youth. What comes next clinches the moral ambiguity of Lucien's role: he falls in love with the very Parisian but still Jewish daughter of Monsieur Horn.

Lucien wields his new power crudely -- he has no finesse, only self-confidence and a well-tailored suit -- but he is drawn to Horn as a substitute father and to the daughter because she -- who herself rejects her Jewishness -- represents urban sophistication as well as femininity. Why does the tellingly named France (Horn takes no political or moral stand himself, but does love the country) sleep with Lucien? There are half a dozen very good reasons. The trajectory of Lacombe Lucien troubles us and makes us weep.

Lacombe, Lucien (1974)

A disturbing and sad movie about surviving the Nazi occupation in France. It's unlike any other film of its type, turning from tender to ruthless in a breath, and from joyous to ghastly just as fast. And though the Nazis are behind the violence and fear, they play a mostly indirect role in the cornering of a small Jewish family in the countryside. This is a tale about French and French, about the Resistance against collaborators.

And it's told from the point of view of the collaborators, a gang of opportunistic thugs who have taken over an old hotel and who terrorize, with German supplied documents, ordinary citizens. The title character is Lucien, an utterly heartless but somehow, at times, sympathetic boy who gets pulled into the lure of these thugs. But he shows a scary detachment from all feeling, even from love at first, and certainly from respect for life. There is a hint that he grew to think human life was cheap from his days hunting and killing animals without a flinch as a youth, but it could be the movie is showing that he had almost a disorder, something that made him unfeeling even for the most ordinary, harmless, vulnerable things. I think the former is more accurate, though, because his hunting rabbits and killing a chicken with his hands were probably (and still are) part of country life where rabbit and chicken were part of the cuisine.

But it's people who will eventually be his target, and he is not like his older counterparts. He doesn't want the spoils of war, not money or finery, resisting at first even the suit the Jewish tailor is ordered to make for him. It is here the movie gets to what matters. Lucien is ignorant enough to not quite see why this Jewish man is any different than other men, but he catches on when others around him make clear the Jew is only alive and in hiding as their choice. I guess they need a good tailor, and they need the man's money (the tailor pays when he makes the suits, it seems). The complication of a beautiful (and very French looking) daughter takes some of the expected turns, but not completely, because this very young man doesn't really know how to behave, or how to fall in love.

The director, Louis Malle, is a legend of French cinema, and later even of American cinema. He depends on location shooting, natural light, and naturalistic acting to give every scene a believability that is both beautiful and at times uncanny, especially combined with violence to animals. The lead actor, Pierre Blase, is almost too convincing in his cool and relatively mindless determination. The tailor, played by Holger Löwenadler, a Swedish actor, is a model of patience and continual assessment, trying to play the game with the thugs for his survival. His daughter is less fully realized, with Aurore Clement playing this charming and innocent girl withheld from normal life by the war. But she does in fact learn to love Lucien in her own way, and he responds in his own way.

Needless to say, the end is tragic and rather perfect. And the whole troubling two hours getting there will leave you moved, for sure, but also enlightened. The problem of loyalty and survival takes on new light here.

Of all of the hundreds of foreign films I've seen through my 42 years, one has stood out in mind – a film I first saw in 1979 and again in 1980. "Lacombe, Lucien," director Louis Malle's searing, powerful film of innocence lost and how power corrupts, is one of the great films in French cinema. That the French themselves criticized the film on its initial release is amazing. That this film has gone for so long without a proper DVD release is unforgivable. The drought of its release to home video is about to end. The Criterion Collection is releasing "Lacombe, Lucien" as part of a three film box set retrospective on Mallle's French films ("Au Revoir Les Infant" and "Murmus of the Heart," two great Malle's features in their own right). "Lacombe, Lucien" also will be available separately by itself. Either way, modern American audiences will finally be able to see this film. And they won't be disappointed. Malle's film tells the story about a young French boy who joins the Nazis and snubs the French Resistance during the German occupation of France. From the powerful performances all the way to Malle's meticulous production design that beautifully recreates period France, this film is unbeatable. As much as I enjoy watching Truffaut films, nothing compares to the genius of Malle. From his French films to his American productions, Malle truly was a genius of the cinema. I suggest you buy the three-film retrospective. Or at the least, but "Lacombe Lucien."

Hannah Arendt's famous phrase sounds custom-made for this film. Young Lucien wants to join the French Resistance, but he's too immature. No problem, the Gestapo's hiring, and it can get so boring during wartime in a small, provincial town.

This film shocked France with its taboo subject of collaboration. They say that anyone can become a torturer. That is where this film's power lies -- Louis Malle lets us confront our heart of darkness. Devastating and unforgettable.