Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lacombe Lucien, 29 Jan 2004
By A Customer
One of Louis Malle's best films, "Lacombe Lucien" caused a stir when it was first released in France in 1974. With his film, Malle asked the French uncomfortable questions about the nature of Occupation and, specifically, collaborators. Lucien is a rough-and-ready peasant from the south-west, with little awareness of the war and its issues, who essentially becomes a collaborator by accident, after being rejected by the local Maquis man, his old teacher. He mixes with a disparate set of Miliciens who take him under their wing and through whom he meets a Jewish family. The love affair that ensues between Lucien and France Horn, daughter of the Jewish tailor, Albert, has its moments of awkwardness and improbability but is also, ultimately, very moving. Lucien can be objectionable and vulgar but the young actor Pierre Blaise - tragically killed shortly after the making of the film - invests the role with an engaging mixture of youthful bravado and sensitivity. If you've only seen Malle's "Au revoir les enfants", try this for a different perspective on the War.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Evil at its most banal and inadequate, 19 Jul 2006
Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien still impresses, although it does tend to amble in the third act just when you might expect it to tighten its grip. But it's still a casually powerful reminder of the less heroic side of France under Vichy rule (the Nazis are barely seen in the film) as its none too bright farmboy just drifts almost accidentally into collaboration with the German Police made up entirely of his compatriots after being turned down for the Resistance. The film's major achievement is in showing, much like fascism in general, the appeal that collaboration had to the disaffected and the underachieving outsiders in the community (only one of the `police' is a real zealot) and the attraction of undeserved and unearned power as Lucien finds the power he has over people (particularly the unspoken threat of handing his Jewish `girlfriend' - perhaps a little over symbolically called `France' - to the Germans) is far more intoxicating than killing mere animals.
Throughout, as with Melville's resistance masterpiece L'Armee des Ombres, there's a mundane sense of reality that heightens the drama. Set in the kind of small picturesque village that outsiders find idyllic but which is a tedious hell to live in for the locals, it shows how malaise and opportunity is far more of a driving force than malice. Certainly it's far from glamorous, its collaborators hanging round in a local hotel getting drunk and bemoaning their lot as the war news gets continually worse (as one points out, you have to listen to both the German and the British radio reports "and split the difference" to find the truth) and they gradually get picked off by the emboldened locals.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is one of those films........, 1 Dec 2000
that just sticks with you.This film had a profound effect on me when I studied it as part of a French degree. It's that kind of film - one that needs going back to several time to peel off the layers. I haven't watched it again for several years but it would appear in my top 5 every time..... Malle is a master of the understated, his roots in the french 'New Wave' movement of the late 1950's that borrowed from the film noir of the 20's & 30's whilst combining with a loose, freeflowing narrative. The film combines the issues of conscience and war with a love story, ultimately tragic and deeply focused on the eponymous individual. All in all, a film that stays with you.
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