Lacombe Lucien, a.k.a. Blaise Pierre.

« Lacombe, Lucien » and Lucien Lacombe both owe a lot to Blaise, Pierre.

Pierre Blaise is an accidental actor like Lucien is an accidental collaborationist. Like Lucien too, he is a farm boy, from Moissac in Tarn-et-Garonne, where Louis Malle found him.

Pierre Blaise bears the same relationship to cinema as Lucien to « Collaboration » : a glamorous, possibly treacherous, universe to which he is unprepared.

Blaise’s thick South Western accent is Malle’s touch of genius. The character’s very voice vouches for his authenticity : bad or good, generous or cruel, as long as he remains faithful to his accent, Lucien is genuine, anything but a fake or a hypocrite.

It is an effective strategy to film world history at grass root level. Even more so with WW2 : after being submitted, willy-nilly, to so much fiction and facts about the period, any fresh perspective is welcome.

With « Lacombe Lucien », Louis Malle follows the same path, in the field of fiction, as historians who immerse themselves into local data to see WW2 through they eyes of a small community or unheralded participants.

Film was shot in the French region of Quercy, where Malle had a home, mostly in the town of Figeac (Lot), with additional filming in Arcambal (Lot) and Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne).

The film locations offer a striking counterpoint to the global conflict. WW2 belongs in, « stricto sensu », another, possibly fantasy, world : invisible and accessible only through creaky radio programmes, it sometimes sounds less real than Orson Welles’s broadcast version of H.G. Wells’s « War of the Worlds ».

While it is now nearly impossible to shed oneself from real time world news, the dearth of information then available is nothing short of fascinating : the collaborationists switch from French Vichy radio to the BBC to figure out the outside world events, which will seal their local fate.

A French assistant to the German Police in Figeac, Lucien is a private working for the local subcontractor of a multinational company : he has declared war on Great Britain, the US, the Soviet Union and is fighting as far as in Asia, with the Japanese armies. And does not know it.

Lucien has mortgaged his life to forces beyond his control and possibly his capacity for abstraction ; WW2, as it plays out in the Figeac microcosm, appears particularly absurd : like the survival of a foreign-owned factory today, its actors’ future is decided on other, global battlefronts.

Malle’s direction does not take sides until Lucien and France escape from the city and war to a few happy days in the forest. The camera then becomes partial to the two young lovers ; possibly because it knows their couple is doomed, it embellishes their happiness to fairy tale level.

A naive and over-lyrical belief in the redemptive and cleaning power of nature briefly takes over, soon obliterated by the brutality of Lucien’s arrest and death.

As the end credits roll, the film has proved nothing : Lucien is neither naturally good nor bad ; was France collaborationist or resistant ? It is not for the movie to answer, it only tells a story.

Controversy lovers nevertheless refused to surrender. At all force, they drew general lessons from « Lacombe Lucien » : Malle was too lenient on collaborationists, Malle underplayed the Underground role, Malle’s characters misrepresented the true motivations of the time ; whatever...

According to a critic, the film demonstrated that you cannot « compromise with social order and refuse the rules of your social class... »

The scandal raisers closed their eyes so stubbornly on the film that they could not read its title : « Lacombe Lucien ».

An administrative file, an ordinary name, shared by many, sentenced by History to long lasting shame : the film endeavoured to give them a face and a chance, to restore Lacombe Lucien, a data base record, to the complexities and inconsistencies of flesh and blood Lucien Lacombe.

Pierre Blaise did not survive his character long. He died driving the car the film pay-check had bought him.

Amateurs of moral tales and social theorists may have thought his death tragic but appropriate : a kid killed by his toy, nature murdered by technology. It somehow matched his character’s demise : no one should try and escape their natural destiny to create their own life...

Meanwhile :

Gunter Grass reveals that, at the age of fifteen, he volunteered to become a submariner : anything rather than the boredom of life at his parents’ home. The French Underground rejected Lucien, the German Navy Two did not take him in. Two years later, Gunter Grass was enrolled into the Waffen SS.

Terrorism pundits labour to explain how young men born and bred in Western countries join the ranks of Al-Qa’ida & Associates : some personal itineraries make as little sense as Lucien’s to anyone who did not watch Louis Malle’s movie.