Lacombe Lucien
Mar. 29th, 2021 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloA 17 year old boy is searching for his identity. There are two gangs in town. He asks to join the cooler of the two and they turn him down, so he accepts an offer from the other. He acquires smart clothes and a gun and uses them to get a girl and lever himself into her family. Only it's not quite that straightforward. This is Vichy France; the gang that rejects him is the Maquis, the one that accepts him is the Gestapo and the family he insinuates himself into is Jewish. Furthermore the year is 1944 and he has attached himself to the losing side.
Lucien has no inner life that we have access to- and no understanding of the awkwardness of his situation. He is played by Pierre Blaise- a non-actor who gives, simply by being a version of himself, a compelling but inscrutable performance. Blaise made two more films in quick succession on the back of Lacombe Lucien, bought himself a fast car with the proceeds, ran it into a tree and died.
The BFI has handed me a set of films by Louis Malle and I'm working my way through them. The first was Lift to the Scaffold- a neat and stylish policier- and this is the second. Malle is the film-maker as anthropologist; he observes, he takes notes, he keeps his distance. Movies rarely unsettle me as much as this one did.
Lucien has no inner life that we have access to- and no understanding of the awkwardness of his situation. He is played by Pierre Blaise- a non-actor who gives, simply by being a version of himself, a compelling but inscrutable performance. Blaise made two more films in quick succession on the back of Lacombe Lucien, bought himself a fast car with the proceeds, ran it into a tree and died.
The BFI has handed me a set of films by Louis Malle and I'm working my way through them. The first was Lift to the Scaffold- a neat and stylish policier- and this is the second. Malle is the film-maker as anthropologist; he observes, he takes notes, he keeps his distance. Movies rarely unsettle me as much as this one did.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-29 10:50 pm (UTC)I've see three movies by Louis Malle—Zazie dans le métro (1960), Atlantic City (1980), and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)—and they have all been great. This one sounds fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 07:59 am (UTC)Apparently the problem is that he made such a wide variety of types of film that he's hard to pin down and classify.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 06:47 pm (UTC)I would agree with that. None of the three films I've seen are structurally or tonally like one another except that they were made by the same person and feel somehow in continuity.
If the set you have access to includes Atlantic City, I think you might like it a lot. It's a kind of elegiac comedy which never quite rises to the cynicism of neo-noir despite involving a stolen stash of cocaine; it's the kind of small-crime-gone-wrong story that's often contemptuous of its floundering participants and here extends a measure of dignity—and more importantly, reality—to everybody, even the people who have been lying their entire lives about the kind of person they are. And it was made on location just as the landscape of Atlantic City was changing for real and irrevocably, and therefore is perfect of its time.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-31 07:34 am (UTC)I think a unifying factor with Malle might be that he presents his characters without sentimentality and- even more crucially- without judgement- a stance I find extremely sympathetic.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-31 08:41 am (UTC)Agreed. It's certainly a mode of directing and acting I like: like them or not, take them or leave them, this is who they are.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 06:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 07:56 am (UTC)