Word: lucien
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...