The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" It is the summer of 1944 in Nazi-occupied France, hundreds of miles from where the invading allies and the Germans are slugging it out. In a tiny farming village, a seventeen-year-old boy returns to...
...They more or less pass each other on their way up and down There is more to Lacombe, Lucien, especially the elegant and bizarre suicidal behavior of France's father and thedawning decency of Lacombe when he saves France's life shortly after raping her...
...He falls in with a slothful and vicious pro-Nazi French nobleman who plays murderous tricks on people and tries to act gallant while he is a butcher...
...Lacombe takes France, played by the anemic-looking yet lovely Aurore Clement, to a party at the Gestapo headquarters...
...All his life he has been on the outside, on the bottom rungs of society...
...The boy does not want to return to his job in a nearby province capital as an attendant at a nursing home...
...Malle is too fond of the slow, slow, stow motion of life, evenevil life...
...The scene where the tailor delivers the suit to Lacombe is the best scene in the film...
...When a cleaning lady who had briefly been Lacombe's lover spots the two together she calls France a great many vile, anti-Semitic names...
...The movie is marvelously well acted...
...Lacombe, in the barely controlled frenzy of hatred and fear that the uncivilized poor feel for theworld of those who wear golf pants, and in genuine ignorance, asks, through clenched teeth, "What are golf pants...
...Suddenly, by throwing in his lot with the Nazis, he turns the tables on the society that has treated him with so little notice...
...Instead of being a figure of pity, he is a figure of dread...
...I'm so sick of being a Jew," she wails over and over...
...The nobleman takes him to a formerly famous Paris tailor, a Jew who has been hiding out in the province town for the whole war and from whom the nobleman has been extorting money while getting elegant suits of clothes...
...Still, the film is a beauty and full of thought...
...Lucien Lacombe is not Sartre or Camus...
...In that sequence, which begins Lacombe, Lucien, the cryptic French director Louis Malle has given us a clear and beautifully filmed insight into the motivations of people who join organizations that most of us find repellent...
...It is overly long but it is an extremely lucid and lovely parable...
...She knows she can blame it on the anti-Semites, but she also knows it would not have happened if she were not a Jew...
...If Malle had just shown us that stage of Lucien Lacombe's life, he would have been doing us an informative service and he would have had a neat twenty-five-minute short subject...
...And there were and are plenty of Lucien Lacombes in the world...
...It tells us something about ourselves and why we do things that we are not proud of, and yet it does so without preaching and moralizing...
...In an instant, he sees, and we in the audience see, that for a boy like him, he is looking at paradise—a place that is warm and bright and luxurious amidst a cold, dark, and rude existence...
...He is taken into the very bosom of the collaborators and within hours is telling them about the schoolteacher who is a resistance leader...
...The Gestapo—French division—is desperate for recruits, what with the war clearly turning against them, so they give Lacombe authority and a fairly free rein...
...He is a boorish peasantly clod...
...Unfortunately, the movie is about 135 minutes long, and could have done everything it had to do in an hour and a half...
...Indeed, it is an insight into why people join any organizations at all...
...And here is the beauty of the coming together of the swinish Lacombe and the lovely and delicate France: he wishes to be lifted out of the herd and she wishes for nothing more than to sink into it...
...That means, of course, that it is marvelously well directed...
...Again, the girl France is not Golda Meir or Helen Keller...
...When people are persecuted and tormented because of something about them, even if that something is, by any decent standard, nothing to be ashamed of, eventually there comes a time, even if it is fleeting, when the persecuted long to change, to lose that distinguishing stigma...
...As he rides his bicycle back to the nursing home, he passes through a town and sees a gaily lit hotel with pretty, heavily made-up girls in a window through which dance music is floating...
...What Malle is showing us then is not how a suave and worldly person would respond to the temptations of joining an evil fraternity, but how a virtual animal would feel...
...The boy is too young...
...The local leader of the Maquis, a schoolteacher, turns him down curtly...
...He feels lost and homeless...
...She longs to blend into the large, unpersecuted mass...
...He has too few cuts...
...She is just a frightened teenage girl who knows that her life has been wrecked because she is a Jew...
...But the place he has stumbled upon is the local headquarters of the French collaborators' auxiliary to the Gestapo...
...But the film is much longer and says a lot more...
...The alternately wheedling and bullying Lacombe pays her visits and tries to be nice to her, while her father—terrified and yet contemptuous—slowly falls apart...
...France runs away and when Lacombe finds her she buries her face in his neck and cries...
...He has a suit made for Lacombe, the first the boy has ever owned...
...The look of rage and confusion on his face, and the look of despair and confusion on the face of the tailor when he realizes he is reduced to making clothes for people who do not know what clothes are, are masterpieces of acting and direction...
...So he tries to join the Maquis—the Resistance...
...The tailor gives the suit to Lacombe and tells him that the suit has golf pants, which the tailor always considers more elegant for a young man...
...The home is with murderers and swine, but it is a home...
...As fate would have it, the tailor has a beautiful daughter whose first name is France...
...In a tiny farming village, a seventeen-year-old boy returns to his home to find that his mother has taken up with another man and that this man does not want him around...
...He lingers too long on a scene—well beyond the point at which we get the message...
...The boy is taken inside and is treated considerately and with kindness...
...He gets the respect born of fear instead of the disregard that characterized all his former life...
...Lucien Lacombe, so accustomed to being treated as a cipher that he routinely gives his last name first—Lacombe, Lucien—has found a home...
...And again, Malle has shown us an extremely intelligent insight into a facet of human character...
Vol. 8 • April 1975 • No. 7
