Verse
Lindeman, Jack
French Underground won't have him (that's why he joins the Gestapo), and to be honest, Dostoyevsky's Underground wouldn't have had him either. But something here is not--if you'll excuse,...
...But something here is not--if you'll excuse, please, the appropriate expression--kosher...
...In Lacombe Lucien we feel the same way, particularly at moments like that when France's father conveniently eliminates himself so Lucien won't have to do so...
...France has already allowed Lucien to make love to her despite her aversion to him, and now with her father out of the way she yields further...
...Here shall be trees & there nothing but a bare sky with an occasional buzzard entering from the womb of the sun...
...Commonweal: 215...
...On the other hand, though, this judgment is perhaps too harsh...
...We are soon to see that Lucien is capable of real brutality with France...
...To the extent that Malle allows it to dominate his film, he too becomes a victim of Lucien...
...The relationship that Lucien develops with France, her father and her grandmother is finally comprehensible only as the relationship of the concentrationcamp guard to his inmates...
...But at the moment that he walks her to the front of the rationing queue, or into the dining room at headquarters, there is a quite ordinary moonishness in his attitude towards her...
...France and her father come to behave as quirkily as Lucien does-they begin to reproduce Lucien's own disregard for them --because their isolation allows him to impose his values on them totally...
...We felt at every turn that Malle was meddling in his characters' lives in order to make their approaching sin acceptable to us...
...Malle's sympathies are entirely suspect here because it would not be the first time that, having chosen a controversial and volatile subject, he soft-soaped the movie he made about it...
...He collaborates helplessly with the Collaborationists...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Even her grandmother, who has been in a state of silent, stony-faced rage throughout the film, finally smiles at the summer night when Lucien escapes to the mountains with her and France at the end of the German occupation...
...His actions spring from mere narrow-mindedness, for his field of vision as he gazes at her is literally too narrow for him to see the consequences of his attentions, especially for her...
...What appears to be Malle's regard for Lucien may therefore be only France's regard for him, a regard born out of despair...
...For the moment at least, his lack of concern for her seems compounded with real affection...
...These swell like mammals wearing their young in a sack beneath their hearts...
...In both scenes it is just the girl he looks at and enjoys, not the way everyone else stares at them and wonders at his audacity...
...OOOQQOQQQOOQOQ JACK LINDEMAN MAP READING I say there is more, a cloud with its foam oozing out of itself, a burden of air, while I accumulate seven oceans, gallop along a longitude with my fingernails scratching the topography of lands unvisited...
...But in a way this selfishness of his comes across as a romantic, almost rebellious disregard for German anti-Semitism...
...Eventually his disregard for the consequences even infects France's father...
...That courtship begins with a scene where Lucien makes the girl, France (Aurore Clement), jump a rationing queue, and it reaches a culmination of sorts when he takes her to a party at Gestapo headquarters...
...What these two scenes share is the blank but fixed way that Lucien stares at this hapless girl in them...
...I know only names guessing at mountains, desiring grass where none has ever been...
...This is precisely what he did in Murmur ol the Heart, where he was so anxious to make incest palatable as drama that he let his characters have little life and fate of their own...
...Like the guard and his prisoners, Lucien and France's family are ultimately united by their dependence on each other...
...But even if this is so, it does not rescue Malle's film...
...I cruise with my eye or let my forefinger broadjump from one meridian to another...
...This is purple or blue & green on the water of things...
...Malle's failing here may not be that he is too sympathetic to Lucien, but too sympathetic to Lucien's victims...
...No matter how sympathetic we might feel toward France, her point of view is still a deranged one...
...From an evil interloper in these people's lives, Lucien has become someone who unintentionally gives them joy...
...It is as if Malle is constantly hedging against the possibility that his film might fail because of Lucien's vileness---as if Malle is so concerned Lucien will offend us by his very nature that he alters all the characters' natures to keep us in our seats...
...After years of cautious hiding he begins going out in public, at last paying a reckless visit to Lucien right at Gestapo headquarters and getting arrested...
...Malle has extraordinarily mixed feelings about Lucien, as his handling of Lucien's courtship with the tailor's daughter demonstrates...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 8
