pt5 – RURAL COLLABORATION

Director Louis Malle and his brother owned the small distribution company that released The Sorrow and the Pity in French cinemas, and in some cases hate mail meant they had to provide guards for the venues where it was showing. [20] A couple of years later in 1974, Malle found himself caught up in further controversy with his feature film Lacombe Lucien, the story of a teenaged peasant (non-professional Pierre Blaise), who in the summer of 1944 ends up working for the French Gestapo in a remote corner of south-west France.

Although Malle felt that The Sorrow and the Pity had ‘prepared the ground by forcing Frenchmen to question themselves on this matter’ [21], Lacombe Lucien still was vitriolically attacked by the Left, particularly in Cahiers du Cinéma where it was regarded as being part of ‘la mode retro’, a cultural trend which involved a ‘snobbish fetishism of old objects (clothes and decor) and contempt for history’. [22] No less a figure than the philosopher Michel Foucault was incensed by the way Malle appeared to demythologise the popular anti-Fascist struggle of the French Resistance. For Foucault, concludes Austin [23], if a ‘positive’ film were to be made in 1974 about the Resistance, it would either be ignored or laughed at by the audience. Yet as Malle argues in a book-length interview surveying his whole career with British critic Philip French, conducted in the early 1990s, ‘in the collective unconscious of the French this [occupation] period is very murky. There was for years, the official history, which had been created by those most involved in the Resistance – the Gaullists and the Communists. The official story was that the French people as a whole were against the occupiers… Of course, the reality is very different. Basically you can say that 95 per cent of the French population were just waiting. There were a certain number of people who went into the Resistance, and also a number of people who collaborated, for various reasons.’ [24]

Malle’s film suggests that choosing whether to resist or collaborate may for some individuals have been spur-of-the-moment rather than a matter of die-hard conviction. Indeed the story illustrates writer Hannah Arendt’s celebrated phrase ‘the banality of evil’ which she used in covering the Eichmann trial in 1961 to try and explain how seemingly ordinary people could carry out acts of extreme violence. Malle’s protagonist in Lacombe Lucien is certainly a social outcast whose father is being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and whose mother (Gilberte Riert) is sleeping with the landlord Laborit who has rented out the farm belonging to Lucien’s family to strangers. Seemingly friendless, the youngster attempts to join the Resistance, only to be told by his teacher Peyssac (Jean Bousquet) that “the underground isn’t like poaching, it’s like the army”. When his bike gets a puncture, Lucien stumbles upon the hotel-cum-interrogation-centre peopled by French Gestapo workers: it’s there that collaborators like the aristocratic Jean-Bernard (Stephane Bouy) and the ex-cycling champion Aubert welcome the adolescent into their fold.

What Lacombe Lucien reveals is the appeal of Fascism to a marginalised and ill-educated figure such as Lucien who seems most at home hunting rabbits and trapping birds. He has no interest in ideology or politics: in one darkly amusing scene, he uses a poster of Marshal Pétain for target practice. Working for what Lucien insists on calling the “German police” however, gives him status and power. He carries a badge and a machine gun and can now afford champagne and flowers to woo the daughter, France (Aurore Clement), of a bourgeois Jewish tailor, Horn (Holger Lowneadler), who are both in hiding and hoping to flee to Spain. (The character France’s outburst that “I’m fed up with being Jewish” was criticised by several Jewish organisations yet seems completely plausible in the context of the drama.)

Skilfully photographed in the Lot region by cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli and accompanied by the jaunty period jazz music of Django Reinhardt, Lacombe Lucien unsettles precisely because Malle refuses to simply demonise his anti-hero, eliciting an impressively understated performance from Blaise. Lucien is a mass of contradictions: annoyed he has been referred to by ‘tu’, not ‘vous’, he humiliates an already tortured resistant by gagging the man and drawing a mouth in lipstick over the tape. But he also prevents France and her grandmother from being deported, killing a German soldier in the process, and leading the women to the safety of the countryside. Following this rural idyll for the young lovers, the final fake caption over Lucien’s face records that he was arrested and executed following the liberation. Justice is thus served by society on this most convenient of scapegoats.

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