Lacombe Lucien

Louis Malle's film about the German occupation of France is based on his own experiences during that time, when he was a teenager (Malle was born in 1932) The young man is Lucien Lacombe, and he is 17 in 1944, when the German war machine has started to fall apart. He lives in occupied France, and as we get to know him, we realize he's a moral cipher with no point of view at all toward the momentous events surrounding him. He's not stupid, but his interest in the war is limited mostly to the daily ways it affects him directly.

It affects him at home, where his mother lives with her lover (his father is missing in action). It affects him at work, where he labors in his boring job at the hospital. A lot of the young men in the town are members of the underground resistance movement. They carry guns, are involved in secret schemes and don't have to mop floors. Lucien approaches the local resistance and asks to join, but he's turned away because he's too young. He wants desperately (if "desperately" isn't too strong a word for such a taciturn character) to break the mold of his life, and since the resistance won't have him, he joins the local Gestapo. This is crazy, we're thinking. Lucien joins the Gestapo almost absentmindedly, and then this bright Jewish girl falls for a guy like that. But Louis Malle's point is a complex one. Neither of these people can quite see beyond their immediate circumstances. They're young, uninformed, naive, and the fact is that adolescent sex appeal is a great deal more meaningful to them than all the considerations of history.

Louis Malle, whose previous film was the bittersweet and lovely "Murmur of the Heart" (1971), gave himself a difficult assignment this time. His film isn't really about French collaborators, but about a particular kind of human being, one capable of killing and hurting, one incapable of knowing or caring about his real motives, one who would be a prime catch for basic training and might make a good soldier and not ask questions.

As played by Pierre Blaise, a young forester who had never acted before (and who died in a road crash a few years later), Lucien is a victim trapped in his own provincialism and lack of curiosity. Louis Malle seems almost to be examining the mentality of someone like the war criminals at My Lai -- technicians of murder who hardly seemed to be troubled by their actions. That's the achievement of "Lacombe, Lucien." But what Louis Malle is never quite able to do is to make us care about Lucien, who is so morally illiterate that his choices, even the good ones, seem randomly programmed. Perhaps to show that illiteracy is the point of the film.

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.

Louis Malle is a master of representing human behavior in a believable manner. By avoiding stereotypical characters, the director maintains a more intense level of suspense due to the unpredictability of the main protagonists. All the performances are excellent especially Pierre Blaise and Aurore Clement as Lucien and France. In my old age, I find French and Italian films present women in a much more interesting and appealing manner than American films where they tend to be little more than eye candy or character studies with minimal sensuality. Virginia Madsen's portrayal of Maya in Sideways is one of the few American performances that can compare with Aurore Clement as France or Jeanne Moreau in Le Notte. Male European directors undoubtedly have a better and more mature understanding of the female psyche. The untimely death of Pierre Blaise shorty after the completion of this film only adds to the importance of this work since he displays a unique talent which was tragically cut short. Weaknesses in the film are a limited portrayal of the resistance fighters and a truncated ending which did not segue well with the final scene.

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.

When this movie was released in 1974, it created a huge scandal and strong controversies because it was the first movie about the second world war to introduce a collaborator and not a resistant as a main character. Louis Malle was surely affected by these controversies and he decided to escape into the dream and imagination in his next film: the odd and underrated "Black Moon". So the main character here, Lucien Lacombe, is a member of the German police but he didn't choose this situation because he is anti-semitic or he's fond of Nazi thesis. It's simply because he is a victim of his naivety and of his foolishness and he's easy to persuade. Several times in the movie, you are under the impression that he doesn't know what he's doing or saying (for example, when he's drinking champagne with Albert Horn, a Jew tailor and his daughter France). On the other hand, the stroke is responsible of Lucien's entrance in the collaboration: the school teacher doesn't want him to enter the Resistance because he's too young, he had a flat tyre.... Moreover, the action takes place in june 1944 and it's not the right era: it's nearly the end of the war I also noticed that the collaborators were initiating him into several activities (at one moment, one of them is learning him to fire with a browning) without taking care of his opinion. With all these happenings, Lucien's behaviour is changing: he becomes rough, haughty, scornful, takes advantage of his wealthy life and committs a few errors ( Horn is under arrest due to him and he didn't want it to happen). At the end, Pierre Blaise provides a great calibre in his main rôle and thanks to this, the film is strong, powerful and remain one of Malle's best films.

Note: the movie was inspired by a real fact: during the second world war in France, a young collaborator had arrested and killed numerous resistants.