Cinema: Corruption's Toys

LACOMBE, LUCIEN

Directed by LOUIS MALLE Screenplay by LOUIS MALLE and PATRICK MODIANO

Choosing sides in a political struggle, even in a world war, can be a matter of happenstance or convenience. The consequences may be grave, but the choice itself can be as casual and amoral as picking out a new suit of clothes. The core of this subtle, intelligent film is that a young man's life can be fixed and shadowed by a decision he hardly knows he has made.

Lacombe, Lucien—which played at the New York Film Festival last week to considerable acclaim—is set in provincial France during the summer and fall of 1944, when Germany's defeat began to seem certain. Lucien (Pierre Blaise), still in his teens, works in a hospital ward. The cries and murmurs of pain from the wounded cause him to turn toward the window, to the summer sunlight. He sees a bird in a nearby tree, singing, and with a certain glee, kills it with his slingshot. It is almost a reflexive action, without real significance to Lucien.

Lurking outside Gestapo headquarters one evening, Lucien is discovered, hustled inside and questioned. With the same lack of remorse or thought that he had given the bird, he informs on a local schoolmaster who is a Resistance leader. Now, Lucien finds, he is suddenly and eminently acceptable to the pro-German Vichy regime's police. One of the collaborating cops, in fact, is a childhood hero of Lucien's, a champion bicycle racer. If the German side is good enough for such an idol, then it is good enough for the boy.

New Toys. Lucien is beguiled by the style in which the police maintain themselves: an elegant chateau, sleek automobiles, well-cut clothes, good food and drink, compliant women. More than the luxury, though, he likes the taste of power. Lucien receives credentials and guns, which he displays freely with a certain sullen, anxious strength. But he never entirely dispels the impression of a child showing off new toys. A police pal takes him to his tailor to buy him his first suit.

The tailor is a rich Jew from Paris, hiding out in an uneasy commercial alliance with his client in hopes of getting to Spain and freedom. The tailor has a daughter (Aurore Clement), who becomes Lucien's quarry. She is fascinated by him, put off by him, intimidated by him. Finally she gives in to him out of a sense of inevitability and because there seems nowhere else to turn. Her name is France.

It is one of the few blatant moments in the film, which is otherwise scrupulously shaded and controlled. Most impressively, Director Louis Malle (Phantom India) does not soften or sentimentalize Lucien, neither judges nor justifies him. Malle's voice is hard and even, his attitude toward his young protagonist understanding, yet cautionary. In Lucien's story, Malle has found a perfect metaphor, direct without being strident, subtle and urgent at the same time. As with Lucien, the foundation for national tragedy is laid quietly, and is built upon with a terrible ease.

The rigor of Malle's portrait of the youth, in fact, makes the movie a little distant. Malle was not after the kind of shattering catharsis that Vittorio de Sica, working with similar material, achieved in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Lucien is understandable but not especially likable, a state of affairs that solves the film's intellectual problems even as it raises dramatic ones.