GUEST POST: LACOMBE LUCIEN, AN AMBIGUOUS COLLABORATION, BY DERVILA COOKE
Lecturer in French Literature at Dublin City University, Dervila Cooke gives us a detailed insight into the film Lacombe Lucien, shown during our Modiano mini-festival in September:
“Le cinéma est une grande famille” declares one of the characters in Patrick Modiano’s 1977 novel Livret de famille. Since Modiano’s novels are well known for their cinematic qualities, this suggests that the writer’s characters form a kind of surrogate family for him. Modiano’s narratives play with flashbacks, flashforwards, dissolves and lighting effects, and subtly allude to techniques such as back-projection (“transparence”). The writer has many family ties to the world of film. As a teenager, he accompanied his father to the cinema on visits home from boarding school. His mother, Luisa Colpeyn, acted on both the small and large screens and was also a translator for Continental, the German-controlled film company in Paris during the war. Louki, the main character in the 2007 novel Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue is described as drawing the light to her, “cinematically speaking ” (“elle accrochait mieux que les autres la lumière, comme on dit au cinéma”). The café in the 2012 novel L’Herbe des nuits seems like a dark cinema theatre. Cinema, more than other art forms perhaps, can provide a sense of wholeness and unity. By contrast with isolated photographs, the images of a film are often “explained” by their sequencing, or by dialogue or other sounds, while cinematic characters generally appear more substantial than those in novels, due to their visual presence. (In Modiano’s, work, photographs are highly charged objects, because of their suggestiveness, their dynamics of absence-in-presence, their flimsiness, their ghostliness and their sometimes disputed roles of identification and of “proving” the past). However, the unity of any film is ephemeral and the best films avoid the creation of a simplistic whole. Lacombe Lucien, the film for which Modiano co-wrote the screenplay with Louis Malle, manages to create a haunting and ambiguous main character, very much in the Modiano mould. It is Modiano’s most accomplished work for the cinema or television – other works include the wrily humorous Le Fils de Gascogne, the sometimes farcical Bon Voyage, and an episode of “Madame le Juge”.
Lacombe Lucien was released in 1974, and is set over four short months, between June 1944 and October of that year. It was critically acclaimed, then highly controversial, among people of very varied political affiliation. Some disliked the fact that the film presented a member of the French Gestapo in a not entirely unsympathetic manner. For some left-wing critics it was objectionable to see a member of the working classes collaborating with the Germans. Other critics were unhappy with any approach to the Occupation past, which was still an uncomfortable subject. The context of the date of the release of the film is important. Henry Rousso, author of Le Syndrome de Vichy (The Vichy Syndrome), an influential work of historical criticism published in 1987, calls the period around 1970 the period of the broken mirror (“la période du miroir brisé”), when the national self-image in France began to be called into question. President Charles de Gaulle’s departure from politics in 1969 seemed to herald a new era. De Gaulle had led the French resistance during World War Two, and went on to be a key figure in French politics between 1944 and 1969. Many historians see him as having been a major force in holding the country together with what Rousso calls a “Resistentialist” myth (others have called this the “Gaullist” myth, or the “Gaullo-communist” myth). This was the idea that all French people had resisted in some way, however small. In 1971, Marcel Ophüls’ landmark documentary film Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) had been screened in cinemas, thanks to Malle’s company, the NEF. Le Chagrin et la pitié was originally meant to be shown on television but due to its highly sensitive subject matter the French government refused to allow it to be broadcast till ten years after its initial release. It was one of the first filmic or literary works to rake up the Occupation and deportation past. There had been others, including Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) already in 1955, where a French policeman’s cap figured controversially, and of course Modiano’s own provocative 1968 and 1969 novels La Place de l’Etoile and La Ronde de nuit. These novels were published in English translation with Bloomsbury in 2015, along with Les Boulevards de ceinture, as part of an Occupation Trilogy (La Place de l’Etoile, The Night Watch, and Ring Roads).
Ophüls’ film in many ways humanized both Resistants and Collaborators, focusing on the reminiscences of people interviewed around the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. Malle and Modiano’s film also humanizes the question of collaboration. Importantly, the film shows that the past was not black and white. Had he been a little older, Lucien could equally have become a Resistant; it is merely by chance that he becomes a member of the Gestapo. He had initially tried to be accepted by the local Resistance leader but was turned away for being too young. (Interestingly, the narrator in Modiano’s La Ronde de nuit (The Night Watch) is a double agent, involved with both the Resistance and Collaborators, provocatively suggesting that some Resistants could perhaps have found themselves on the other side, had circumstances pushed them in that direction).
Yet, despite his humanization, Lucien remains very blank in many important ways. Pierre Blaise, who plays Lucien, was chosen because he was unknown and therefore would not encourage any pre-conceptions about his character by the audience (Aurore Clément, who plays France, was chosen for similar reasons). It is often very difficult to establish what Lucien is thinking, or whether he is thinking at all. It is hard to know whether he has any moral qualms about anything, whether he is sometimes trying to work out the implications of what is being said or done, or whether he is actually incapable of moral reflection. Indeed, this is at the heart of the film’s ambiguity, and it has been criticized for this – although many critics see its ambiguity as its strength. Lucien’s face is deliberately expressionless a lot of the time – impenetrable and distant. Olivier Rocheteau’s commentary on the screenplay of the film, published in a Folioplus edition by Gallimard in 2008, highlights the film’s engagement with Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil – the idea that someone like Eichmann, the key organiser of Hitler’s Final Solution, could claim at his trial in 1961 that he was just doing his job, without reflexion. However, in the key scene involving a pocket watch and a German officer towards the end of the film we need to look closely at how Lucien acts and reacts, and at what motivates him. Here is at least one instance where we are being asked to judge his self-focussed actions, with their potentially devastating ramifications, at a time when Lucien has lost some of his naivety.
Malle had worked on various versions of the film for several years before he approached Modiano – then in his late twenties – to co-write the screenplay. Malle deliberately made Lucien 17 years of age – neither fully a boy nor quite a man. Pierre Blaise’s physical appearance is significant here, as he has the strong body of a man but the chubby cheeks of a boy who doesn’t even seem to shave yet. He is given numerous lines that begin with “So and So says that…”, as if Lucien is a child who simply parrots off things that he has heard. This uneducated farmboy has never met a Jew in his life and has never heard of the Freemasons. His true place seems to be in the natural environment, running around in childish glee after chickens or hunting rabbits in the fields and bringing birds home for supper, as we see in the opening and closing sequences, and in the scene where he turns to shoot at a rabbit during a raid on a Resistance hide-out. The suits he starts to wear never seem right for him, and the knee breeches sewn for him by Albert Horn emphasize his youthful nature (no doubt an act of symbolic revenge by Horn). His accent is bumpkin-like, making his beloved phrase “police allemande” sound vaguely ridiculous. However, through its very local nature, his accent also drives home the very French nature of the Gestapo française.
Although he is power-hungry, self-centred and can be cruel, young Lucien is also uneducated, ill-informed, a little stupid, and sometimes naïve. In a key line from the film, Albert Horn, the persecuted Jew, says to Lucien “C’est curieux, je n’arrive pas à vous detester tout à fait”. For all of these reasons, it is hard to blame Lucien fully for what he does: His father is a prisoner of war, and he has no proper male role model. He is eager to ape those he falls in with. Fundamentally, he is looking to assert himself as a man. He seeks adventure, power and status. He has no ideology, and neither do his fellow French Gestapistes, who work as information-gatherers and hit-men for the Germans. Some of them use a poster of the Maréchal Pétain for target practice. Ideologically committed fascists would never have done such a thing. It is important that Malle had originally thought of Lucien as a member of the Milice, the French militia set up in 1943 and loyal to Pétain, but that he ended up discounting that idea. One of the working titles of the film was Le Milicien (another was Le Petit Lucien). We do see the Milice in the film, with their black berets and uniforms, in the scene where Lucien shoots at a rabbit. Some recent critics of the film have not picked up on the distinction between the Milice and the Gestapo, but it is highly significant that Malle ultimately made Lucien a non-ideological Gestapiste, as this turns him into more of an everyman.
It is of vital importance that Lucien becomes a Gestapiste by accident, as his bike develops a puncture and he ends up dragged into the Gestapo headquarters at the Hôtel des Grottes. Lucien stupidly joins the Gestapo in June 1944, when the tide has already turned against the Germans, a fact the servant girl Marie tries to bring home to him when she draws him into her bedroom. Lucien’s blank expression in this scene suggests his incomprehension of political events, and his complete dissociation from them. Paris was liberated in August 1944 and the film ends in October of that year, with Lucien’s summary execution for collaboration with the enemy.
An important foil for Lucien in the film is the cultured Jewish family who are hiding out locally. Modiano’s input into the film is very obvious in these scenes. (The Modiano touch is also clear in much of the general dialogue and in the scene descriptions, and also in the venal and often raucously frivolous atmosphere of the Hôtel des Grottes, memorably encapsulated in the self-serving figures of Jean-Bernard de Voisins and Betty Beaulieu.) The Jewish father is a rich Parisian tailor, Horn, who is called Albert, like Modiano’s own Jewish father. He has patriotically named his daughter “France”. Lucien and France have a love-hate relationship. France is an accomplished classical pianist, knows which champagne to drink, can dance at evening parties, and in many ways dominates Lucien with all these things. However, crucially, as a Jew she is also in danger of her life. Her mother is absent, perhaps dead, perhaps deported. France’s dressing gown, evoking the striped uniforms of concentration camp inmates, suggests the fate that could so easily await her, as do the trains that pass in the night with their sinister muted whistles.
The power-relationship between the bumpkin Lucien and the cultured Albert is of even greater significance. Lucien seems to be looking for a father figure, yet at the same time he controls whether Albert lives or dies. The awfulness of this situation is no doubt partly what motivates Albert to take control of his own fate by his symbolic suicide in giving himself up to be deported. As so often with Modiano, two characters – in this case Lucien and Albert Horn – serve to project conflicting aspects of Albert Modiano. Like Lucien, Albert Modiano is associated in Modiano’s narratives with the Gestapo. In Albert’s case, the links arise from his black-market activities supplying the Germans and their French accomplices during the war, and also because he was a Jew in danger of his life. At Lucien’s age of 17, Modiano senior was, like him, a directionless young man left to his own devices. His father had died when he was a small boy and his mother does not seem to have had much input into his life. She died in any case when Albert he was 25 according to the information in Un Pedigree. (This 2005 text is Modiano’s most complete and reliable autobiographical account to date, and reaches as far as the writer’s coming of age with the publication of his first novel at age 23). In 1930, at age 18 and therefore still a minor, Albert got into petrol trafficking, and during the war he continued trafficking of different kinds. Many of Modiano’s narratives suggest that he had some connection with the notorious gang at number 93, rue Lauriston, a key French Gestapo address for torture and black-market dealings during the war. Yet it is perhaps even more important that, like Albert Horn, Albert Modiano was a Jew in danger of his life during the Occupation.
Horn’s situation was as personal to Malle as to Modiano. Malle was a boy during the war years and witnessed the arrest of three young Jewish classmates when he was at boarding school. It took Malle forty years to directly deal with this profoundly traumatic event, through its fictionalized treatment in Au revoir les enfants (1987). Their shared haunting by the Jewish deportations is one of the most memorable aspects of Lacombe Lucien, through the constant tension and unspoken fear of denunciation that weighs on Horn. In Malle’s case deportation was directly witnessed, and in Modiano’s case he is haunted by what could have happened to his father. Albert Modiano was arrested several times but escaped on each occasion, unlike Horn.
It is to Lucien’s credit that he tries to hurry Horn out of the Gestapo headquarters, demonstrating his attachment to him as a father figure. Yet barely a few scenes later, the enigmatic teenager seems prepared to stand by while France and her grandmother are rounded up for deportation, and even to provide armed backup to the German officer commanding him. It is pure self-interest that dictates his shooting of this officer, in a desire to retrieve “his” pocket watch, and to take revenge on him for confiscating it and belittling him. A few short scenes later we see the laughing Lucien running around playfully like a child, mock-chasing the girl he was prepared to abandon to the fate met by over 75,000 hunted Jews in France. He seems opportunistic and amoral, reacting to most events without reflexion or commitment. Once Albert has gone to meet his fate, Lucien dumps his girlfriend immediately – after what looks very like a rape –, perhaps fully aware for the first time that he is at risk if he remains involved with her. However, he also displays a strong childish innocence on many occasions, and seems genuinely happy to be with France when circumstances throw them together at the end. This cinematic character is now one of Modiano’s surrogate family, but no doubt even his co-creator finds him a little ambiguous.
This is an expanded version of the introductory talk to Lacombe Lucien given on 16 September 2015 at the Institut français de Londres, as part of the Modiano festival. To see the list of online sources used in this article please click here and for more information about Dervila Cooke's work on Modiano, you can find her research page here. The trailer for the film can also be accessed here.