Louis Malle

Another film from my Top 25 is Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, the story of a boy's entanglement with Nazis in 1944 occupied France.

Malle had another similar story in mind when he conceived of this tale of innocence and moral confusion. That story he wanted to film in Mexico or Chile, but he was unable to gain a foothold to work in either country. The story he had in mind was malleable (pardon the pun) enough to adapt to 1944 Vichy, which I've always argued is its inherent strength.

Though the film brims with Nazis and spoon-feeds the viewer requisite sketches of evil, the story is really about an easily manipulated boy who falls in love for the first time. The story could happen anywhere the force of power injects itself into nature.

The young actor in this film was an unknown amateur in 1974. Malle cast him to bring an edge of awkward innocence to the Lucien character. The result is an unsure performance that translates into a defining attribute of the character's nature.

Malle, who died in 1995, was a magician and this is my favorite of his films. I've published the following short essay in Alt-Everything.


Death and Innocence


The young protagonist in Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) is a troubled and impressionable anti-hero. His detachment underscores his inability to comprehend the significance of his turn to thuggery, the damage he inflicts on others, and the violent repercussions his actions are destined to create. He is apolitical, damaged by a tough childhood, an empty vessel with an underdeveloped moral sensibility. Had there not been a war and Nazi occupation of France, Lucien’s life might have played out as a career criminal’s anyway. The conditions created by war simply hastened his fall from innocence, igniting his conflicted yearning for acceptance and meaning.

An opportunist, Lucien first asks to side with the resistance as the Nazis begin to lose control of France in the fourth year of occupation. Slighted by one of the movement’s leaders, he stumbles to the other side out of curiosity and desperation. Among the collaborators, he finds a band of thugs happy to befriend him and put him to work against the resistance.

Malle deliberately opts out of a political discourse in Lucien’s story, letting the gang stew in a vat of corrupt aloofness. One must be careful then to look first to Malle’s narrow focus on thuggery at the expense of placing the Vichy government and Nazism in a broader political context. The film’s limited political tone contributes to its disregard for the causes of the occupation; a viewer ignorant of all but the vaguest details of Vichy and the Nazis may enjoy it because it is really more about a desperate teen than it is about history. It’s Rebel Without a Cause, European style.

Because Lacombe is a film about a disturbed boy rather than an exact documentation of political upheaval, the narrative focus isn’t concerned with why or how occupation and collaboration merged to create the conditions under which the French were forced to live during World War II. Its real concern is the effect of war on the psyche of a particular personality type, a morally and spiritually lost youth.

Brett Bowles argues that a filmmaker’s “primary goal is to tell a compelling story rather than to contextualize and to analyze the dynamics of that story” (Bowles, p. 23). One may watch Malle’s film in this light and indeed be entranced by the story and its swell acting, and still not dig very deeply into the dynamics of the occupation. One may not in fact understand the occupation nor have the slightest intent to learn about it—Lacombe, Lucien entertains before it teaches, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The child in Rene Clement’s Forbidden Games (1952) is younger than Lucien by a decade, and so not surprisingly is completely innocent. Lucien’s reaction to the trauma of war is played out off camera in the years before Malle begins his story. Lacombe thus provides the viewer with a basic kit of psychological factors that portend Lucien’s decision-making (the sling-shot-killing of a bird, a rabbit slaughter, the seething anger and contempt he feels for everybody except his mother), and an implied history of borderline sadism. All of it is based on an imagined past which pre-conditions Malle’s story; then Malle gives Lucien choices he is incapable of making intelligently within the narrative of his story.

The little girl, Paulette, in Games hasn’t any choices at all. The effect of war on the six-year old compared to the teenage Lucien must be analyzed in light of certain prejudices that are commonplace in our understanding of the life-span development of human psychology. Whereas Lucien understands death, and early in the story thrives on its availability to assuage his boredom, Paulette in Games must learn of it for the first time when she sees her parents and dog die.

In a sense, the difference between Lacombe and Games is the degree to which the lead characters in both films, of varying ages, come to know and embrace death. The cold-blooded killer Lucien embraces death because it is something he can identify with. It is part of the natural order of his upbringing. Growing up, he kills birds, rabbits, chickens—all of it is natural to his peasant life, a reality that it would be impossible to question. The little girl learns to embrace death first by fantasizing about it. She must learn then through repetitive conditioning what death is, how it is ritualized, and how it creates finiteness.

The little girl and her new friend, Michel, are awed by the rituals of death and make a game of practicing them, complete with faux funeral services. Their ability to fantasize about death saves them from the terror of war. The closer the war comes to them, the more intense their games become.

Lacombe and Games are both films about lost innocence. They become studies in the psychology of war among children rather than studies of historical events. Again, there is nothing wrong with the direction or scope of the films from the standpoint of drama and storytelling, but as supposed historical works they do confront some of the problems with context Bowles seeks to alleviate as an educator (Bowles, p. 24). While being highly humanistic and psychologically relevant films, they are simple narratives, and simplicity just doesn’t work in history; and they do not contextualize events because they are not documentaries.


Source

Screening les Annees Noires: Using Film to Teach the Occupation, Brett Bowles, from French Historical Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (winter 2002) p. 23.




TS