Chris Knipp
08-15-2006, 09:56 PM
Lacombe Lucien is part of a new Criterion Collection Louis Malle 3-disc DVD release (along with the director's 1971 Murmur of the Heart and 1987 Au revoir les enfants). Released in the US in the Seventies, Lacombe Lucien was never made available on US video, which makes this new release specially significant.
Louis Malle: Lacombe Lucien (1974)
A troubling complicity
For the lead role in Lacombe Lucien of a casual young collaborator with the Gestapo in wartime France, Louis Malle, after a long search, cast 21-year-old Pierre Blaise, a first-time performer of astonishing poise, authority and good looks. Blaise, whose life was tragically cut short by a car accident two years after the making of this film, was a provincial youth with a local accent Malle couldn't find among professional actors in Paris. Brutish yet cherubic, Blaise is sullen and pouting but ineluctably present. He has some of the looks of the young Delon, to whom a few compared him. As Malle says in a French TV interview (http://www.ina.fr/archivespourtous/index.php?vue=notice&from=personnalites&code=C0524224422&num_notice=2&total_notices=3) of the period, Blaise turned out to be "very, very gifted."
The atmosphere of this interview suggests that in some circles not everyone was as violently upset by or opposed to the film as we are 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.
Malle's eighteen-year-old anti-hero goes to work for the Gestapo, identifying himself to people as "police allemande," German police. He threatens many and kills at least one (the real person on whom he's based killed many). The essence of the film is to show how war alters realities, as in the recent André Téchiné film Strayed/Les Égarés (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=321), in which also a youthful outlaw briefly assumes considerable authority, and thus multiplies moral conundrums. There's no question that Lucien does wrong, but what is questionable is whether he is responsible for his acts. It's not the acts that are different on either side -- collaborator or resistance -- but the politics. Allociné's commentary (http://www.allocine.fr/film/anecdote_gen_cfilm=447.html) on Lacombe Lucien points out that "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.
Lucien 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. It's messy and confusing. Let's not forget even Horn is negotiating with with collaborators to get false papers and escape to Spain. In the end Lucien fails to save Horn, but takes off with France and her grandmother, whom he has called an "old witch" but now tenderly cares for. We don't know how that ends, but we're told by end titles that he was captured by the resistance court, tried, and executed. An uneasy, unforgettable classic, and an experience, like its two companion pieces in this new package, that troubles us and makes us weep.
For those who had not previously seen Lacombe Lucien like myself, the Criterion DVD is waiting.
Louis Malle: Lacombe Lucien (1974)
A troubling complicity
For the lead role in Lacombe Lucien of a casual young collaborator with the Gestapo in wartime France, Louis Malle, after a long search, cast 21-year-old Pierre Blaise, a first-time performer of astonishing poise, authority and good looks. Blaise, whose life was tragically cut short by a car accident two years after the making of this film, was a provincial youth with a local accent Malle couldn't find among professional actors in Paris. Brutish yet cherubic, Blaise is sullen and pouting but ineluctably present. He has some of the looks of the young Delon, to whom a few compared him. As Malle says in a French TV interview (http://www.ina.fr/archivespourtous/index.php?vue=notice&from=personnalites&code=C0524224422&num_notice=2&total_notices=3) of the period, Blaise turned out to be "very, very gifted."
The atmosphere of this interview suggests that in some circles not everyone was as violently upset by or opposed to the film as we are 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.
Malle's eighteen-year-old anti-hero goes to work for the Gestapo, identifying himself to people as "police allemande," German police. He threatens many and kills at least one (the real person on whom he's based killed many). The essence of the film is to show how war alters realities, as in the recent André Téchiné film Strayed/Les Égarés (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=321), in which also a youthful outlaw briefly assumes considerable authority, and thus multiplies moral conundrums. There's no question that Lucien does wrong, but what is questionable is whether he is responsible for his acts. It's not the acts that are different on either side -- collaborator or resistance -- but the politics. Allociné's commentary (http://www.allocine.fr/film/anecdote_gen_cfilm=447.html) on Lacombe Lucien points out that "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.
Lucien 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. It's messy and confusing. Let's not forget even Horn is negotiating with with collaborators to get false papers and escape to Spain. In the end Lucien fails to save Horn, but takes off with France and her grandmother, whom he has called an "old witch" but now tenderly cares for. We don't know how that ends, but we're told by end titles that he was captured by the resistance court, tried, and executed. An uneasy, unforgettable classic, and an experience, like its two companion pieces in this new package, that troubles us and makes us weep.
For those who had not previously seen Lacombe Lucien like myself, the Criterion DVD is waiting.