584 - Lacombe, Lucien, France, 1974. Dir. Louis Malle.

Friday, January 25, 2019

584 - Lacombe, Lucien, France, 1974.  Dir. Louis Malle.

Lucien Lacombe lives in France under German occupation.  If there were no war going on, he would be a farmboy who prepares chickens for cooking.  With the coming of the war, he becomes a hospital orderly who shoots birds with slingshots.  But with the war progressing to where it is now, he turns into a self-interested officer of the German police.  The Gestapo.

Not because he cares which side he is on.  He tried to join the French Resistance first, but they turned him down for being too young.  So he went to the Germans and turned in the man who turned him down.

And even that action might have been motivated more by drink than by revenge.

Lucien does not think about the world or about the war or about Germany or France or about history or ethics.  He enjoys the importance he feels from being allowed to carry a gun and tell other people what to do.  Especially his elders.

It makes him feel good.

His father is missing, probably a POW in a German prison camp, and his mother has a boyfriend.  So he could stay at home and be a kid and take orders from a man who is neither his father nor step-father, or he can go off and be a man.  And feel important.

Lucien takes up residence in the home of a French tailor.

We discussed the quartering of soldiers when we watched Jean-Pierre Melville's film The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949).

https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/03/083-silence-of-sea-le-silence-de-la-mer.html

In that film it was 1942, and a German soldier took up residence in a French home.

In this film it is 1944, and a French citizen takes up residence in a French home, functioning as a German police officer.

The word for this type of person was collaborator.  Lucien is a Frenchman collaborating with the enemy.

The fact that it is 1944 matters, because by this time the Germans are on their way to losing.  So aside from the moral and ethical implications of betraying his country, Lucien has also made a tactical error by joining forces with an army that is about to lose and be individually prosecuted.

Meanwhile, the French tailor is Jewish.  And he has a daughter.  Named France.  And Lucien takes a liking to her.

So we have a French kid parading as a German police officer with orders to arrest Jews, who is living with a Jew and dating a Jew.

Lucien does not put a lot of thought into his choices.

Louis Malle takes his time with the story, and he takes the time to show off the beauty of the French countryside.  He focuses on a world that is away from the fighting but awash in bureaucracy.

Before he began making movies on his own, and before becoming Jacques Cousteau's favorite underwater cameraman, Malle assisted Robert Bresson, so he took with him a proclivity for using non-actors or first-time actors in some of his films.  He did it with Catherine Demongeot in Zazie dans le Metro (1960); he did it with Benoît Ferreux in Murmur of the Heart (1971); and he does it here with Pierre Blaise as Lucien Lacombe.

Lucien always gives his name in reverse, as Lacombe, Lucien, as if he is always speaking to a fellow bureaucrat, who is about to record it in an official file.

Louis Malle cowrote the screenplay with novelist Patrick Modiano, a man whose first book was published in 1968 and whose most recent book was published in 2017.  In 2014 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In 1974, Lacombe, Lucien was his first screenplay.

This is the story of a specific boy who made specific choices under specific circumstances.  And it shows the consequences of those choices.

It is also the story, by implication, of a group of people who may have buckled under pressure.