HeadlinesExotic Boring

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Twilightfa Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Fulke Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

richard-1787 I recognize that this is a well-made movie. But I still didn't enjoy it, and had to push myself to stay with it.It is the story of an amoral, troubled young man (the Lucien Lacombe of the title) who takes pleasure in killing rabbits and other small animals, though early on we see that he had feelings for an old horse. In the last days of the Occupation of France, after the Allies have landed on the Normandy beaches, he decides to join with the Militia and the German police, the Gestapo. He takes pleasure in frightening others with his gun.He also has a romantic side, of a sort, and falls in love, or at least in lust, with the daughter of a Jewish tailor. At times he helps them out. Sometimes, he does not.We never get to understand why he is so often so indifferent to the pain of others. But we are left to understand that such a man - an adolescent, still - could become a militia man.For me, the movie was too slow and too long. I didn't find that I was learning anything new about Lucien as the film progressed, and so saw no reason to stick with it, other than a dogged determination to see the thing through. If I hadn't needed to watch it for a project, I would never have stuck with it to the end.But, as you can see, others on here loved it. It is well acted, often beautifully photographed.I just didn't care for the story or most of the characters.I much prefer this director's later movie about the Occupation, Au Revoir les Enfants, which I found deeply moving.

atlasmb "Lacombe,Lucien" is the story of Lucien--a young Frenchman--during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany. This is a very unglamorous story. Although it occurs during WWII, there are no dramatic battle scenes, no tales of spies or political intrigue.Lucien aligns himself with the Germans, not because of his political persuasions, but because they allowed him to join their ranks. He is a relatively unemotional person. His approach to life seems to be purely pragmatic. Until he finds himself attracted to a young Jewish woman named France.Bt this is not a love story. There is little passion involved. Lucien's life seems to be about trading commodities, including favors and threats. France is a weary country, occupied and insulted. The Jews who live in the small town where France and her family live try to become invisible while they eke out a meager existence."Lacombe, Lucien" is not a true story, but is based upon the wartime experiences of its director, Louis Malle. It might be said to sympathize with those who gravitated toward the Vichy side of things, but only because it does not condemn them. Clearly, every Frenchman was a victim. The quotidian approach of this film allows the viewer to consider a moment in French history without hyperbole.

tenebrisis Louis Malle's film about the German occupation of France is based on his own experiences during that time, when he was a teenager (Malle was born in 1932) The young man is Lucien Lacombe, and he is 17 in 1944, when the German war machine has started to fall apart. He lives in occupied France, and as we get to know him, we realize he's a moral cipher with no point of view at all toward the momentous events surrounding him. He's not stupid, but his interest in the war is limited mostly to the daily ways it affects him directly.It affects him at home, where his mother lives with her lover (his father is missing in action). It affects him at work, where he labors in his boring job at the hospital. A lot of the young men in the town are members of the underground resistance movement. They carry guns, are involved in secret schemes and don't have to mop floors. Lucien approaches the local resistance and asks to join, but he's turned away because he's too young. He wants desperately (if "desperately" isn't too strong a word for such a taciturn character) to break the mold of his life, and since the resistance won't have him, he joins the local Gestapo. This is crazy, we're thinking. Lucien joins the Gestapo almost absentmindedly, and then this bright Jewish girl falls for a guy like that. But Louis Malle's point is a complex one. Neither of these people can quite see beyond their immediate circumstances. They're young, uninformed, naive, and the fact is that adolescent sex appeal is a great deal more meaningful to them than all the considerations of history.Louis Malle, whose previous film was the bittersweet and lovely "Murmur of the Heart" (1971), gave himself a difficult assignment this time. His film isn't really about French collaborators, but about a particular kind of human being, one capable of killing and hurting, one incapable of knowing or caring about his real motives, one who would be a prime catch for basic training and might make a good soldier and not ask questions.As played by Pierre Blaise, a young forester who had never acted before (and who died in a road crash a few years later), Lucien is a victim trapped in his own provincialism and lack of curiosity. Louis Malle seems almost to be examining the mentality of someone like the war criminals at My Lai -- technicians of murder who hardly seemed to be troubled by their actions. That's the achievement of "Lacombe, Lucien." But what Louis Malle is never quite able to do is to make us care about Lucien, who is so morally illiterate that his choices, even the good ones, seem randomly programmed. Perhaps to show that illiteracy is the point of the film.

secondtake Lacombe, Lucien (1974)A disturbing and sad movie about surviving the Nazi occupation in France. It's unlike any other film of its type, turning from tender to ruthless in a breath, and from joyous to ghastly just as fast. And though the Nazis are behind the violence and fear, they play a mostly indirect role in the cornering of a small Jewish family in the countryside. This is a tale about French and French, about the Resistance against collaborators.And it's told from the point of view of the collaborators, a gang of opportunistic thugs who have taken over an old hotel and who terrorize, with German supplied documents, ordinary citizens. The title character is Lucien, an utterly heartless but somehow, at times, sympathetic boy who gets pulled into the lure of these thugs. But he shows a scary detachment from all feeling, even from love at first, and certainly from respect for life. There is a hint that he grew to think human life was cheap from his days hunting and killing animals without a flinch as a youth, but it could be the movie is showing that he had almost a disorder, something that made him unfeeling even for the most ordinary, harmless, vulnerable things. I think the former is more accurate, though, because his hunting rabbits and killing a chicken with his hands were probably (and still are) part of country life where rabbit and chicken were part of the cuisine.But it's people who will eventually be his target, and he is not like his older counterparts. He doesn't want the spoils of war, not money or finery, resisting at first even the suit the Jewish tailor is ordered to make for him. It is here the movie gets to what matters. Lucien is ignorant enough to not quite see why this Jewish man is any different than other men, but he catches on when others around him make clear the Jew is only alive and in hiding as their choice. I guess they need a good tailor, and they need the man's money (the tailor pays when he makes the suits, it seems). The complication of a beautiful (and very French looking) daughter takes some of the expected turns, but not completely, because this very young man doesn't really know how to behave, or how to fall in love.The director, Louis Malle, is a legend of French cinema, and later even of American cinema. He depends on location shooting, natural light, and naturalistic acting to give every scene a believability that is both beautiful and at times uncanny, especially combined with violence to animals. The lead actor, Pierre Blase, is almost too convincing in his cool and relatively mindless determination. The tailor, played by Holger Löwenadler, a Swedish actor, is a model of patience and continual assessment, trying to play the game with the thugs for his survival. His daughter is less fully realized, with Aurore Clement playing this charming and innocent girl withheld from normal life by the war. But she does in fact learn to love Lucien in her own way, and he responds in his own way.Needless to say, the end is tragic and rather perfect. And the whole troubling two hours getting there will leave you moved, for sure, but also enlightened. The problem of loyalty and survival takes on new light here.