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