Short Take: Lacombe, Lucien

Director Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, set in France during the final weeks of the Nazi Occupation, is a haunting portrait of the banality of evil. The film's greatness is in its refusal to allow for easy judgments. Lucien (Pierre Blaise) is a rural 17-year-old who, in the opening scenes, is denied status and fulfillment everywhere he turns. He works as a janitor at a hospital that's too far from his hometown to make a daily commute. He's less than welcome in his family's home in any case; his father has been imprisoned by the Nazis, and the man his mother has taken up with doesn't want him around. He tries to join the Resistance, but the local leader--his old schoolmaster--considers him too dim to be of use. He then falls in with the local Gestapo, and for perhaps the first time in his life, he is made to feel like he belongs. Malle establishes Lucien as a moral idiot, and that he becomes a Nazi thug for the homeliest of reasons, but the film never asks one to view him with hatred. One sees how out of place he is among the gentry, the bureaucrats, and the hangers-on who make up the local collaborators. He falls in love with a Jewish girl (Aurore Clément) whose family is laying low in the community, and the film deftly renders the class tensions between him and the girl's father (Holger Lowenälder). The father, a bourgeois tailor, seethes at having Lucien, whom he regards as an uncouth hick, both living in his home and sharing his daughter's bed. It's impossible not to sympathize with his anger, but one also recognizes the snobbishness that's partly behind it. One's ambivalence about Lucien is strongest in the pastoral final section. The country-boy hunting and survival skills that made him of such use to the Nazis belonged here, not corrupted by brutalizing his countrymen. And one sees his happiness, particularly with his hearty laughter during a moment with the tailor's daughter. Malle shows the ideal of who Lucien is in this woodland setting, and that, in many ways, he's an innocent brought low by circumstances. The film ends with a brief text epilogue telling what happens to Lucien next. It leaves one torn over whether it's justice or tragedy, and one must ultimately reconcile it as both. Malle wrote the superb script with novelist (and future Nobel literature laureate) Patrick Modiano. He dramatizes it matter-of-factly and with striking intelligence. No implication is glossed over; it's there for all to see. Everything serves the material, from Tonino delli Colli's deep-toned cinematography to the shrewd casting of the non-professional Pierre Blaise in the title role.