Resistance, Rebellion and Death

Truth, a French saying goes, resides in the nuance. The Second World War, perhaps, is the historical event whose nuances we are least sensitive to. In order to get on with the job of rebuilding after 1945, the nations of Europe buried their doubts and differences to produce their own official histories of the war years, reflected in government patronage, broadcast by government-owned mass media and taught in government-run schools.

As long as Charles de Gaulle, in or out of power, dominated French politics, the myths of the Resistance he broadcast from London, Brazzaville and other centers of the Free French during the war--myths that seemed substantiated by the victory of his allies, myths that were hammered into the minds of a new generation of Frenchmen during a decade of personal rule in the sixties--all remained unchallenged. Nearly all Frenchmen, de Gaulle maintained, played their part in the Resistance, with moral support if not active aid. Only a few collaborators had betrayed the nation, and they had been punished after the war. Once the vast majority of the French people had been cleared of any taint of guilt, a wide spectrum of political groups could re-enter French politics on a roughly equal basis regardless of the real role they played during the war. The chief French culture heroes of the '50s and '60s, Camus and Sartre, each had connections with the Resistance that persuaded Leftist intellectuals to go along with the consensus. But since the disgrace and death of de Gaulle, this consensus has been exploded, and Frenchmen have eagerly devoured a whole succession of books and movies about the Occupation ever since The Sorrow and The Pity brought the issue out into the open a few years ago.

Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien is among the best things to come out of this groundswell of interest in the war years, and one of the best films of recent years by any standard. Malle's recent film Murmur of the Heart, was an uncannily successful film about adolescence and incest, a comedy of sexual manners. Lacombe, Lucien is an unlikely sequel, as morally provocative a film about the question of social and individual guilt as has ever been made. The bare bones of the story go something like this: In June, 1944, a dispossessed young peasant of southwestern France drifts into collaboration, makes love to a young Jewish refugee and is executed by the Resistance. But it is the complications of the plot that are emphasized, not the outline. Outlines--though no film or history can be much more than an outline--leave out the nuances and so do violence to the truth.

The film opens with Santayana's aphorism, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it," and no more words appear on the screen until the film's conclusion, when the countryside idyll Lucien is enjoying is interrupted by his death-sentence: "Lacombe, Lucien was arrested, court-martialed and executed by the Resistance on October 14, 1944." Our reaction to the film depends on how we make sense out of these two sentences and their relation to the action they enclose. If we take into account Lucien's background, his motives, and complete indifference to politics and morality, then the crude military justice of the Resistance may seem hardly more than a mirror-image of the oppression of the Nazis. Or Lucien's execution may simply be meant to recall us from a world of pastroal make-believe, where no one seems guilty because everything is so beautiful, to the harsh world where men have to make rough-and-ready distinctions between the guilty and the innocent if they and their freedoms are to survive.

The film's social criticism seems largely to excuse Lucien. He starts out emptying slop buckets in an old age home; his father is a prisoner of war and the man his mother has taken in to run the farm won't let Lucien stay home for more than a few days at a time. Restless, Lucien tries to join the Resistance, not out of any political convictions, but because he has a friend in it already and it represents an identity. But the schoolmaster who is the local commander of the maquis won't let Lucien join--"we already have too many young ones," he says, too many restless teenagers looking for an identity.

Walking his bicycle home through the streets of the town, Lucien passes the Hotel des Grottes, local headquarters of the collaborators. Caught staring at the racy sports cars parked outside, listening to the sounds of fashionable music and unaware of the curfew, Lucien is grabbed from behind by a guard and taken for questioning as a spy. Inside, an unlikely group of outcasts--a playboy aristocrat, a cycling champion past his prime, a colonial black, a police inspector dismissed by Leon Blum's Popular Front before the war--reigns over the hotel in sybaritic decadence. Downstairs is all dancing and champagne; only once in a while does anyone go upstairs for "business"--torture and interrogation.

Lucien immediately recognizes the cycler, a childhood hero, and the collaborators turn friendly. He's offered a drink, and another drink, and before he knows what he is doing, he's given away the identity of the schoolteacher who wouldn't let him join the Resistance.

In the morning, the underground leader is captured and Lucien finds himself effectively expelled from local society, and as a result, drifts into collaboration. The aristocrat takes him to be fitted for a fancy suit from a Jewish tailor--one of Paris' most fashionable before the war--whom he's blackmailing. The tailor, Albert Horn, has a beautiful daughter named France, and Lucien decides--both because of her beauty and as an expression of his new power as an associate of the Germans--to court her. Despite his clumsiness, he succeeds. France, attracted by Lucien's rough good looks, bored with the shut-in life of a refugee, and hoping to escape to Spain through Lucien's patronage, becomes his girlfriend.

The Occupation then represents a gap in two centuries of bourgeois rule in France, a kind of servant's ball when outcasts can enjoy power for the first time and aristocrats can regain it. On this level, Lucien is a victim, rejected by a society that then turns around and kills him for joining its opponents. His decisions are never ideological; he is killed not because he is immoral but because he is amoral, not because he has made the wrong decisions but because he has made no decisions at all. The people responsible for Lucien's alienation are responsible for his crimes, and it is they who punish him as well. Like most of the collaborators, Lucien's links to his "side" of the war are based on the accidents of his personal history, the nuances of his particular case.

Lucien's actions are produced by the reaction of external events on instincts, and his instincts are peasant instincts. In the middle of a pitched battle between the collaborators and members of the maquis holed out in a farm-house, Lucien catches sight of the ripple of a hare darting through the high grass and instantly turns to fire at it. The first thing he does after shooting the German officer who has come to take France and her grandmother away to a concentration camp is to steal a gold watch from the dead man--a watch the German had stopped Lucien himself from stealing, earlier, from France's baggage. And Lucien's peasant instincts are part of a whole social outlook whose chief maxim is to look out for your own interests. One man writes to the Gestapo to denounce his neighbor, with whom he may be quarreling for any number of non-political reasons, fishing rights or a stolen chicken; the war allows the continuation of peacetime rivalries by different means. A peasant maid at the hotel befriends Lucien, takes him to bed, and cautions him not to get mixed up with the collaborators "who are not people like you and me." When Lucien later brings France to the hotel, the maid gets hysterical. She attacks France, screaming "Dirty, dirty Jew!"--the jealous rage of a rejected woman is inextricably mixed with the underlying anti-Semitism of the European peasant. But here jealousy predominates. Her anti-Semitism would not have come to the surface in such a violent way if it hadn't been the channel for other resentments, just as Hitler needed German's economic and political frustrations as well as her endemic anti-Semitism to make "the Jewish question" so powerful a part of his regime.

The people of Malle's France cannot be easily divided into two sets of people, one innocent and one guilty, in the kind of division set up by Gaullist myths and by any government trying to administer a system of justice. There is a continuum ranging from the full-time members of the Resistance, through others willing to help out when needed; through those who try to stay neutral or who try to get something for themselves by exploiting the black market or extorting money from refugees like the Horns; toward the far end of the spectrum there is Lucien, who actually joins the Germans and enjoys it. Towards the end, just before the maquis raids the hotel and kills all the collaborators except Lucien, who is hidden upstairs, a captured member of the Resistance offers him a chance for pardon if he will help him escape. Lucien rejects the offer--the man has irretrievably insulted him by asking how old he is. Given an explicit chance to re-enter society and save himself, he rejects it--out of pique.

The intense beauty of the final scenes prevents us from feeling it is a false comfort they are enjoying. Instead, it seems as if Lucien has at last been lured by chance into making one right move in his life. It's as if he always could have been this way, a confident huntsman, a good husband and a good son. Considering its grim subject, Lacombe, Lucien is remarkably full of beauty and humanity. After all the jesuitical casuistry of who was right and who was wrong, it is not the social background we tend to remember--and Malle may be reproaching us for this forgetfulness in his opening and closing quotes--but images: Lucien riding his bicycle down the hill at breakneck speed while Django Reinhardt plays guitar at breakneck speed on the soundtrack; France playing Beethoven or rising from bathing in a stream, like a figure out of myth; the grandmother opening herself up to nature at last, as she bends down with the eye of benevolent intelligence to watch a cricket on a leaf at sunset; the innate elegance and courage of Albert Horn; the noble face of the aristocrat's hound; and the images of the countryside itself, unearthly grey before a thunderstorm, intensely green beneath the rain.

The war wrecks some of this, allows some of it to happen. Lucien would probably never have become an outlaw if it hadn't been for the war. Malle focuses not on great events themselves but on how great events enter and overpower the lives of individuals. We can never be completely sure about Lucien--Malle doesn't tell us quite enough about him and the society around him for us to be sure in our judgment.

But it seems as if the most important thing about Lucien's death is its social context. We shouldn't so much be concerned with judging the rights and wrongs of his actions, but with removing his motivations. It is the social injustice Lucien confronts that must be remembered--and corrected--if we don't wish to have to shoot Lucien again, or, next time around, be shot by him.

Lacombe, Lucien is playing at the Charles West Cinema.