Political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s over-quoted/over-simplified description of the ease of Nazi complicity as ‘the banality of evil’ finds cinematic form in this remarkable Louis Malle film. Lucien Lacombe, late teens, working as a hospital custodian in 1944 Occupied France, drifts almost accidentally into joining the German Police after a former teacher, now running the local Underground Resistance, turns him down. A farmer’s boy, with the brute force & cruel cunning of a country life, Lucien shows little education or social skills, an empty vessel waiting to be filled. What Nazi officers & French collaborators see is a useful assignment-ready thug. (And in Pierre Blaise, the non-professional Malle discovered for the role, we see an infinitely readable face . . . with nothing to read on it. Thoughts and feelings inferred.) But change is coming on two fronts for Lucien. First, from a cosmopolitan, morally degenerate collaborator who becomes mentor, introducing him to ‘the better things,’ including a Jewish tailor from Paris he hides (for a price), along with the man’s delicately beautiful daughter. Second, from the encroaching Allied Forces making steady headway into Occupied territory. Malle lets this play out in near documentary form, observation rather then explanation. It means an occasional loss in the narrative line, narrowing the focus on Lacombe who can show sparks of decency at unlikely moments, without ever abandoning the threat of casual violence. Only at the very end, in flight and in his element out in the country, does he let his guard down to reveal the face war took from him.
DOUBLE-BILL: Malle’s better known, and much loved other WWII story, AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS/’87, a film taken from personal memory about Jewish students hiding at the school he attended, has a warmth and sentiment not found in LACOMBE’s tough, conflicted response. Equally superb in its less controversial way; both films essential viewing.
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