French Cinema Since 1945

The location is a small provincial town in south-west France, during the final months of the Nazi occupation in the summer of 1944. The 18-year old peasant Lucien Lacombe (Pierre Blaise) is bored with his life as a hospital cleaner and tries to join the Resistance but is turned down on account of his immaturity. Cycling home, he gets a punctured tyre and finds himself after curfew at the local Gestapo headquarters. Drunk, seduced by the apparent glamour and power, and flattered by their interest in him, he is easily recruited by the German police. He starts works as a Gestapo agent, revelling in his new-found position of power and tyrannising his fellow countrymen.

Lucien is taken by his new friends to be measured for a suit by Albert Horn, a successful Jewish tailor who has left Paris to seek refuge and relative safety in the depths of the provinces. Here he meets, M. Horn’s daughter France (Aurore Clément) and begins an affair with her. The film charts his ambiguous relationship with the family whom he persecutes and bullies whilst sleeping with the daughter. Eventually, M. Horn’s exasperation reaches breaking point and he gives himself up to the Gestapo. Lucien arrives at the apartment to see France and her grandmother being deported. He rescues them, killing a German soldier, and helps them to hide in the countryside. After a brief rural idyll together, we learn that Lucien was tried and shot as a collaborator.

Louis Malle’s controversial story of a young collaborator was released at a time (1974) when the Gaullist political era was coming to an end and the history of the Occupation was being being re-written. The movie was one of the first feature films to de-mythologise the ‘official’ record of France as a nation of resisters. It provoked intense debate on account of its ambiguous portrayal of collaboration. Lucien, who could just as easily have joined the maquis, becomes a collaborator almost by accident. The film – which refuses to condemn him outright – portrays him as a naïve and instinctive youth who has no insight into the ideological meaning of his actions. He seems to typify the shortsighted, pragmatic collaborator who is neither a supporter nor an opponent of the Vichy regime, neither for nor against the Germans, neither pro- nor anti-semitic.

The film can also be seen as typifying the mode rétro that strongly affected fashion and popular culture in the 1970s. The attention to period detail in the costume, sets and soundtrack create a strong impression of authenticity. It was shot on location and casts a non-professional local peasant in the main role, giving a feel of documentary realism to the film at times.

Despite belonging to the same generation as Godard and Truffaut, Malle as a director was more classical than New Wave. Although his intention with Lacombe Lucien was to make a film about collaboration (he told an audience: ‘What they teach French children about the Occupation is a bunch of lies’), it can just as easily be seen as a love story set against the background of the Occupation.