ABSTRACT
First screened in 1974, with a script by Louis Malle and novelist Patrick Modiano, Lacombe Lucien tells a fictional story of Lucien (Pierre Blaise), a peasant youth of 17 years old, who is pulled into the headquarters of French collaborators working for the German police in Figeac, a small country town in the south-west of France. The date is the summer of 1944, after the D-Day landings. Unwittingly Lucien betrays the schoolteacher of his village, who is the leader of the local maquis, but when made aware that the teacher is being tortured he makes no attempt to break away from the circle of collaborators. He is given a gun and an identity as a member of the Gestapo, and, by using his new-found power and ease of life, courts France Horn (Aurore Clément), the young daughter of a bourgeois Jewish tailor, hiding in the town. He both assaults and attracts her, while continuing anti-resistance activities with no political or ideological motivation, but with a clear enjoyment of power. In an act of flamboyant despair, Monsieur Horn, the tailor, gives himself up to the collaborators, his life ruined by what he sees as an intolerable liaison between his daughter, France, whom he describes as a ‘fragile being’ and the uncultivated peasant, Lucien, whom he cannot quite bring himself to detest completely. Lucien is sent with a German soldier to arrest France and her grandmother, but shoots the German soldier in the back as he is leading them to the car, drives off with France and the grandmother towards Spain, only to break down in the wilderness of the countryside. There they survive, in a kind of idyllic return to nature, before the film is ended on a long shot of Lucien’s face, upturned to the sun, over which his arrest and execution are announced in words of simple, narrative fact. The music of Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club de France features throughout the film. Lacombe Lucien won the Prix Raoul Lévy and the United Nations Award for best film.
