Rotkiv89 Lacombe Lucien by Malle is one of the best movies ever made about fascism and the psychological question: "who were the fascists?"... This is a dark and very non-compromising drama/war film set in Vichy France where the childish, but "tough", young Lucien, living in a small farmer village, gets denied membership when he seeks to join the resistance movement. Instead he ends up in the headquarters belonging to the French fascist collaborators at a hotel in a nearby town. He soon gets to represent, for us viewers, the "banality of evil" as he without thinking twice gives up names of, and goes on to take part in the Milice round-ups and actions against suspected anti-fascists. Lucien, who has no real political beliefs of his own, uses the privilege and power that comes with being able to say that he represents the "german police" in the town. But he also begins to fall in love, in his own odd way, with the daughter of a Jewish tailor while still being part of the occupation forces.Lacombe Lucien is not your typical WWII drama, this is a very beautiful but grim movie full of questions about where the limits go between something being just ignorance or active evil. The nihilistic themes and atmosphere of hopelessness when Lucien, who seems to have no thoughts at all about what he is doing, sinks deeper into fascism, is something that we get to feel very early on in the film.The viewer is probably constantly wondering "maybe Lucien will begin to realize things now?" but instead director Malle takes us only deeper into the abyss that Lucien has ended up falling into... willingly. The dialogues and the acting in this movie is superb, the casting and the sets are perfect. A true masterpiece, great art.Lacombe Lucien is a must-see!

evening1 What would it be like to have one's rural French town controlled by Nazi collaborators? Director Louis Malle masterfully conjures the sense of vulnerability that would result if "la milise francaise" had commandeered the nicest hotel in town and used it for torture, dances, executions, and sex.I have read that Malle wanted a non-actor to play the lead here, and he auditioned 1,000 young men before choosing Pierre Blaise as Lucien. The baby-faced teenager is a natural for a part that calls on him to be blithely cold, manipulative, cruel, and absolutely vacuous when it comes to having a soul.I was filled with apprehension through much of this deeply disturbing film. Malle is able to induce trepidation in the viewer as one wonders, with dread, what Lucien will do next. A scene in which he accosts a bound-up torture victim who has been left in a room is practically unbearable to sit through. The depth of Lacombe's depravity is stunning.Yet Lucien has stumbled into his position somewhat accidentally, after abandoning a position as a janitor at a nursing home. Lacombe is the type of person who will kill a songbird just because it's there, or poach more rabbits than anyone can eat just because he's a good shot.It's little wonder that this cipher of a human being seeks out the milise when local Resistance fighters reject him as too young. His mother, who has had to make her own grave compromises because of the war, worries about Lucien, and who could blame her? When she warns Lucien that he'll eventually be shot for his deeds, he shrugs it off, telling her he likes it where he is, and stuffs a few francs into her purse.In this at least partly based-on-truth story, Lacombe eventually gets his comeuppance. How tragic (according to Wikipedia) that Blaise, only a year after the movie came out, lost his life as well -- crashing the Renault he'd bought with wages earned from the film.A truly astonishing work.

writers_reign Even today some thirty years after this film was released the subject of Collaboration remains sensitive in some areas of France. For someone like me, non-French, no known French or German relatives and by extension no immediate family or even friends directly affected, it verges on the impertinent to discuss this film at any but a technical level. I find it excellent in all main areas, writing, acting, direction, cinematography, hardly surprising given that it was written and directed by Louis Malle. Superficially it appears simplistic in the extreme; a young French teenager attempts to join the Resistance in 1944 and is rejected on the grounds of youth on the strength of which he becomes an active member of the 'German police'. This is not unlike, say, Englishman William Joyce, attempting to join the British Armed Forces at the outbreak of World War II, being rejected on grounds of health and therefore deciding to transpose himself into Lord Haw-Haw and broadcast German propaganda to Britain. Malle has Lucien stumble by chance into the German police and, finding the water fine, gradually immerse himself. Watching the film is like negotiating a moral minefield and I don't feel it is for me - on the grounds cited above - to comment further on this aspect. Suffice it to say I found it a fine, courageous film and will surely return to it on DVD.

zetes Fantastic WWII movie about occupation-era France. Lucien Lacombe (Pierre Blaise) is a hulking teenage farmboy nobody. When he hears about the resistance, he tries to join up with it but is rejected by the school teacher who does the recruiting. A short while later, he inadvertently gives up the teacher to a group of Frenchmen working with the Nazis. He's slightly upset at his mistake, but when he is welcomed by these collaborators, he thinks he's found a place to fit in. Plus, as one of the few French people who is pretty much free to do whatever he likes, he begins to throw his weight around. This mostly takes the form of a "friendship" he forms with his tailor, a half-Jewish foreigner over whom he has absolute power. He intimidates the man (wonderfully played by Holger Löwenadler) and openly (and threateningly) hits on his daughter (Aurore Clément). Malle's film is best when it just observes the characters interacting. It's very slow moving, but the power struggle between the characters is fascinating. It is a film where you're pretty much always going to despise the protagonist, but one can also sense the humanity in him.