Lacombe Lucien

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien. This was I think his most acclaimed film, though he had many such – heck, he was hired the day he graduated from film school to direct the film of a Jacques Cousteau expedition, and he and Cousteau won an Oscar for it!

So the story: it’s 1944 and we are in the southwest corner of France, in the countryside near the spanish border. Young Lucien is a janitor at a hospice. He doesn’t talk much. And he has a sort of callousness about him, established by his gratuitous slingshot killing of a small bird singing on a branch outside the hospice ward window.

He goes home to the family farm when he has a few days off, only to find a bunch of strangers staying there. His mother is sleeping with a guy while his father is off fighting with degaulle or in jail, I didn’t catch which. Lucien is only happy when he’s out in the fields shooting rabbits.

He goes to his old schoolteacher to join the resistance. But the schoolteacher tells him he’s too young, and they have too many young kids like him. Lucien says he doesn’t want to go back to cleaning bedpans, but it’s no good.

He bicycles back to town to the hospice, but gets a flat on the way. This brings him into town after curfew, and he’s dragged into the local hotel where the collaborators, the French ‘German police’ are headquartered. But they take a liking to him, get him drunk, get him talking, and he tells them all about his schoolteacher.

Next thing he knows the schoolteacher is brought in to be tortured, and Lucien is a member of the German police.

They lead a fine life. Lucien is just a punk really, a young thug with not much conscience, no principles, not a thought in his head.

One thing the film does very well is play off silences, pauses when people don’t say anything, and we have to fill in what’s going on in their heads ourselves.

Lucien along the way meets a jewish tailor in hiding in town, and his lovely daughter. Lucien wants this girl bad, but she’s cultured and refined from Paris, and he’s a country bumpkin and a punk. Nevertheless they become lovers, and she begs him to help her father get across the border to spain.

Finally the father, outraged at this punk fucking his daughter, acts foolishly and gets arrested. The daughter blames Lucien. The way Lucien understands it, it was the father’s own fault – but Lucien really doesn’t understand anything. This is a constant source of irritation in watching the movie, that we are so much smarter than Lucien, and wonder what the hell he is thinking, can he really be so dumb?

Later on the Germans come to arrest the daughter and her grandmother, and Lucien goes along to show the Germans where to find them. Lucien takes back a gold watch he had given the father, but the German soldier takes it from him. Lucien then shoots the German soldier and flees with his girl and her granny. And we can’t be sure if in the end he shot the German soldier to help his girl, or just to get the watch – which is the first thing he does after he shoots the soldier.

They drive into the mountains toward the border, but the car overheats. They they must go on foot, but granny is not going to be able to climb the mountains.

Finding an abandoned farmhouse along the way, they move in. Lucien is back in his true element. He catches birds and rabbits. Granny plays solitaire like always. The girl plays with Lucien, sleeps with him, thinks about killing him in his sleep. (She’s another one with long silences during which we wonder exactly what is going on in her mind).

The peaceful idyll ends abruptly – not with German soldiers like we all expect, but with the credits. As Lucien lies in the cool grass, dozing, and his girl watches him from the pool where she’s been bathing, titles appear on the screen telling us he was arrested on October 12 1944, sentenced to death, and executed.

We aren’t told anything about the girl or granny.

The end.

The story is told with fragments, scenes, gradually filling in the portrait of the young punk. Once he hooks up with the girl, most of the scenes are concerned with his relations to that family, his awkward wooing, alternating with threats against the father and attempts to make nice. These scenes have a ghastly hilarity – they might give rise to nervous laughter, and I think some are intended to be funny; my dad and I didn’t laugh, though I chuckled once.

The actor who plays the tailor father gives the best performance. it’s quite good. Lucien is played by a young actor who looks right, and almost looks young enough; but he’s not a subtle actor, so Malle can only have him look rather blankly on. I wonder if whether this actor had been more accomplished, we would not have had to be guessing so much at what’s on his mind. On the other hand Malle might have been frustrated himself with this character, and this type of character. Maybe in the end he doesn’t know why such a character joins the German police other than the obvious reasons.

The German police are typified as semi-losers, quite banal, ordinary. They act more like gangsters low-caliber gangsters, than representatives of any government. It’s an interesting glimpse into what society is like when it breaks down like that.

Did I like it? Parts of it. In the end I feel frustrated, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again.

(written around 10 March 2009)