Lacombe Lucien (1974)

Lacombe Lucien is a French war film first released in 1974, directed by Louis Malle.  The film stars Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler, Therese Giehse and Stéphane Bouy.  It has also been released under the title: Lacombe, Lucien.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


The location is a small provincial town in south-west France.  It is June 1944 and the country is still under Nazi occupation.  Tired of his life as a hospital cleaner, 18-year old Lucien Lacombe tries to join the French Resistance, but is turned down on account of his age.  All too easily he is recruited by the German police and works as a Gestapo agent, arresting his fellow countrymen and tyrannising his former friends and relations.  However, whilst initially revelling in his new-found power, Lucien begins to have second thoughts when he meets and falls in love with a young woman, the daughter of a Jewish tailor he has been persecuting...

It says something that upon its original release in 1974 Lacombe Lucien was described as dangerous by the same quality French newspaper that had previously hailed it as a masterpiece.  Even as late as the mid-1970s, thirty years after the Liberation, France was not yet ready to accept the reality of its wartime record and instead clung to the fabricated version of history that General de Gaulle had authorised upon coming to power.  In this version, France had been a nation of heroic résistants, actively opposing the Occupation and making the job of the Allies that much easier when they deigned to launch their offensive in June 1944.   It wasn’t until the late 1960s, early 1970s that the true picture emerged.  In Marcel Ophüls’ celebrated documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) the resistance myth was blown apart, revealing that, far from being involved in the resistance, most French people had been attentistes, tolerating but neither opposing nor supporting the occupying power, whilst a significant minority had in fact been actively collaborating with the Nazis.  (There was even some evidence that the French government had used the Occupation as a cover to pursue its own anti-Semitic agenda.)  This was the truth that no one wanted to hear, but it was a truth that director Louis Malle felt impelled to explore in Lacombe Lucien, his most provocative and ambitious film.

Louis Malle was one of the first commentators on the Occupation to avoid the kind of spurious Manichean didacticism that had previously characterised France’s wartime relationship with the Nazis.  It is significant that the central character in Lacombe Lucien - the 18-year-old Lucien - is not someone we can entirely hate (as one of the other characters in the film says of him), in spite of the despicable acts he commits and his apparent lack of conscience.  Lucien is corrupted by evil, used for evil ends, but he himself is neither evil nor good.  Instead, he exists in a state of moral confusion and ambivalence, incapable of realising the evil he himself perpetrates.  Lucien is the proverbial mixed-up teenager who happens to get mixed up with an evil regime before his adult sense of responsibility has a chance to assert itself.  Lacombe Lucien is as much a coming-of-age drama as it is a study in the corruption of innocence and can be seen as a companion piece to Malle’s previous portrayal of adolescent awakening Le Souffle au coeur (1971).  It is Lucien’s lack of moral awareness that make him so vulnerable to the lure of Nazi evil, to the easily gained power and sense of self-importance that will give him what he needs most, an adult identity.   No, we cannot hate Lucien - he is merely doing what all human beings are prone to do: seizing an opportunity that allows him to acquire a feeling of self-worth.  It is probably this which made the film so unpalatable to French audiences and reviewers in the mid-1970s, the notion that ordinary people could become complicit in an evil régime through unthinking naivety.  How much easier was is to accept the de Gaulle fiction that the collaborators had been a minority of warped individuals who were implicitly evil and therefore not representative of France as a whole.

As well as taking a gamble with the subject of his film, Louis Malle made the bold decision to cast two complete unknowns in the leading roles.  Concerned that a professional actor would be unable to supply the veracity he sought for his main character, Malle cast a 22-year-old woodcutter named Pierre Blaise for the part of Lucien.  Although Blaise had absolutely no interest in cinema and was so unwilling to be an actor that he almost walked off the set at one point, he was an inspired casting choice and perfectly captures the innocence and undeveloped persona that the role demands.  There is nothing false or strained in Blaise’s performance - he is Lucien, a confused adolescent who appears strangely disconnected from the world around him and yet is so eager to be a part of it.  It would have taken a professional actor of exceptional ability to have made a more convincing Lucien Lacombe than the one that Blaise portrays with such self-unaware ease.  Blaise did appear in a few films after this one, but he soon grew disillusioned with acting and returned to his former woodcutting career.  He died tragically in a car accident a year after the release of Lacombe Lucien, aged 23.   For the lead female role, Malle cast another unknown, the young model Aurore Clément, who also proved to be a highly serendipitous casting choice. Not only is she stunningly attractive, in an unconventional, pre-Raphaelite way, but she provides the humanist counterpoint to her co-star’s morally vacuous Lucien, allowing us to see the latter character in a more sympathetic light.  After this remarkable debut, Clément went on to enjoy a long and distinguished stage and film career.

Louis Malle made Lacombe Lucien towards the middle of his career, during what may loosely be termed his humanist phase.  After his eye-opening documentary Calcutta (1969), which exposed the extremes of social conditions in modern day India, Malle’s cinema suddenly acquired a far greater sense of personal involvement.  Indeed, his previous films might almost be written off as frivolous entertainments if they had not been so masterfully made.  It was also around this time that Malle became more provocative, in both the subjects he tackled and his cinematic approach.  Between Lacombe Lucien, he made Le Souffle au coeur (1971), an uncompromising depiction of incest, and Black Moon (1975), a bizarre expressionist fantasy that is surely Malle’s weirdest film.   It can reasonably be argued that Louis Malle’s career as a film auteur did not begin until the early 1970s.  Certainly his most interesting and challenging work is not to be found in his early films, but in those he made in the second half of his career.  It was because Lacombe Lucien dealt with such difficult issues, and dared to confront the thorny issue of collaboration honestly and from a uniquely humanist perspective, that it didn’t quite achieve the recognition it deserved.  Not surprisingly, it was judged far more favourably abroad than at home; it won the Best Film BAFTA in 1975 and was nominated for an Oscar.  Today, the film is rightly considered one of Malle’s great achievements, surpassed only by his other wartime drama, Au revoir les enfants (1987).

© James Travers 2011

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