Lacombe Lucien [Widescreen]

Lucien Lacombe (Pierre Blaise) is a young peasant trying to make ends meet in Nazi-occupied France. Bored with his job cleaning in a country hospital, he first tries joining the Resistance, then the Gestapo, in his search for excitement and to earn some extra cash. He puts his own success as a collaborator at risk, however, when he finds himself falling in love with, and then exploiting, the daughter of a Jewish tailor (Aurore Clement). Using an almost detached camera, Louis Malle’s controversial film is a verite-style drama of corruption, apathy and amorality. Young Lucien’s succumbing to the allure and promises of the Nazis’ is not an isolated act but a response to the casual war profiteering, prostitution and opportunism that he sees the adults around him engaging in. What is truly shocking is the ease with which people are shown becoming accustomed to the most vile and extreme acts of torture and genocide. Malle’s discreet and circumspect mise-en-scene resists manipulating the viewer through sensationalism or moral self-righteousness; Lucien’s descent is all too identifiably human. On it’s release “Lacombe Lucien” was widely acclaimed as one of the director’s greatest films, but it was also savagely maligned as a betrayal of the heroism of the French people, and a betrayal of the promise and hopes of the Resistance (a criticism echoed by both left and right). In the end, “Lacombe Lucien” is one of the few films that can be argued to not only de-romanticise our most popular conceptions of war, but also manages to deal effectively, bravely and unforgettably, with the “banality of Evil”. In French with English subtitles.