Lacombe, Lucien
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Lacombe, Lucien |
| Original title | Lacombe Lucien |
| Country of production | France , FR Germany , Italy |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1974 |
| length | 137 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Louis Malle |
| script | Louis Malle Patrick Modiano |
| production | Claude Nedjar |
| music | Django Reinhardt and Quintette du Hot Club de France , André Claveau , Irène Tébert |
| camera | Tonino Delli Colli |
| cut | Suzanne Baron |
| occupation | |
| |
Lacombe, Lucien is a feature film of French director Louis Malle from the year 1974 . The drama is based on an original script by Malle and the writer Patrick Modiano and tells of a farm boy (played by the amateur actor Pierre Blaise ) who was recruited as a Gestapo helper in a French provincial town during World War II and was given access to a Jewish woman who was hiding there Family is looking for.
action
June 1944 , in a prefecture in southwestern France. The seventeen-year-old farmer's son Lucien Lacombe earned his living as a caretaker in an old people's home during the German occupation . When he gets vacation, he returns to the local farm. While Lucien's father is in Germany as a prisoner of war , his mother has taken a lover with whom she runs the farm. Lucien, who is only tolerated at home, spends his free time poaching rabbits that he kills with his father's rifle. His request to the local teacher Peyssac to join the Resistance is rejected - he is not reliable enough.
By chance, one evening in the city, Lucien passes the Hôtel des Grottes , which is the headquarters of the collaborators ( Gestapo française, Carlingue ) . Here he meets the former cycling champion Aubert, the police chief Tonin, the black Hippolyte, the burnt-out nobleman Jean-Bernard and his lover, the actress Betty Beaulieu. Everyone has come to terms with the Gestapo . Under the influence of alcohol, the naive Lucien betrays the teacher and begins to work for the German secret police. Among other things, he sleeps with the much older employee Marie and takes part in criminal attacks on Resistance members and fights against the "partisans".
Through Jean-Bernard, Lucien met the Paris-born, sophisticated Jewish tailor Albert Horn, who went into hiding in the provinces with his daughter France and old grandmother Bella. The boy falls in love with attractive France and takes advantage of his position of power by visiting the Horn family regularly in their apartment. Father and grandmother are forced to tolerate the intruder, while France is interested in Lucien. One evening he takes her to a party in the Hôtel des Grottes , where the jealous Marie insults her anti-Semitic. Then France collapses and is seduced by Lucien.
The number of Gestapo members is gradually being decimated - Tonin is seriously injured in fighting, Jean-Bernard and Betty are ambushed and shot on their departure. Lucien's mother comes to town to persuade her son to flee after receiving anonymous threats; but he stays. Horn denounces his daughter as a "whore" in front of Lucien. After giving up hope of escaping to Spain, he visits Lucien in the Hôtel des Grottes , where he is recognized as a Jew and deported.
France and her grandmother are said to be arrested after an attack on the Gestapo headquarters, in which everyone except Lucien from the group of collaborators was killed. Lucien accompanies an SS man to the Horns' apartment, but shoots him shortly before leaving and escapes with France and her grandmother in the countryside in an abandoned farmhouse. In this idyll, Lucien takes care of the two women with hunting and setting traps. France is about to drop a stone on the sleeping boy's head, but rejects the thought. While she washes herself naked in a stream and Lucien is watching her, a text inserted into the picture announces that Lucien was arrested after the liberation of France on October 12, 1944. Found guilty of the Resistance in a military court, he was sentenced to death and executed.
History of origin
Idea and script
After filming Fibrillation (1971), Louis Malle toyed with the idea of making a film about a current scandal in Mexico in which the police trained petty criminals from the slums to become auxiliary police officers in order to infiltrate student demonstrations. However, his Spanish-Mexican director colleague Luis Buñuel pointed out the impossibility of this project. Malle also refrained from a project on the Vietnam War . Instead, he dealt with personal memories of World War II and decided to devote himself to the topic of collaboration in French small towns. From a cinematic point of view, according to Malle, this aspect had previously only been dealt with by Marcel Ophüls ' documentary The House Next Door - Chronicle of a French City During the War (1969), which Malle and his brother Vincent had loaned out in Paris .
For several months of research, Malle included conversations with surviving collaborators, former Resistance members, and historians, including Pierre Laborie , who was preparing his dissertation at the University of Toulouse at the time . Laborie gave Malle information about conditions in the Lot department during World War II. The script grew to the basic constellation - a farm boy who comes to town and begins to work for the Gestapo. It was only through a chance occurrence in the small town of Figeac, when Malle heard someone practicing a melancholy Beethoven sonata on the piano, that he was, according to his own account, inspired to the figure of the Jewish daughter France. After that, Malle worked with Patrick Modiano . The young writer had successfully addressed the occupation as a theme in his previous novels La Place de l'Étoile (1968), La Ronde de nuit (1969) and Les Boulevards de ceinture . Modiano received an eight-page synopsis from Malle , which already contained the figure of Lucien and the Jewish family, who still had three daughters. He initially described the title character as a little too brutal, while the character of Albert Horn was still a simple tailor. Modiano eventually shortened the staff of the Jewish family to father, daughter and a grandmother in order to better concentrate on the love story. According to Modiano, Jewish minor characters in French films about the occupation were rather rare at the time.
occupation
Right from the start, Louis Malle decided to cast the title role with an amateur actor, a real farm boy, who until now had hardly come into contact with urban life. For this, advertisements were placed in regional newspapers such as La Dépêche du Midi , which was followed by around 1,000 letters. After screen tests with a few candidates, Malle chose the young Pierre Blaise , for whom the role was practically written for him, according to Modiano. The character of the Jewish girl France was also cast by a young amateur actress, Aurore Clément . In the other supporting roles, the Swedish theater and film actor Holger Löwenadler acted as tailor Albert Horn and Therese Giehse as grandmother. The German theater actress was still completely unknown in France at the time.
Reviews
In his contemporary review, Edgar Wettstein ( film-dienst ) praised Louis Malle for the sensitively designed title figure and the roles of the persecuted Jews, whose reactions are individually nuanced. The film radiates an “unusual maturity” in that it leaves a lot “open” as a portrait and as an image of the time . Wettstein also praised the amazing presence of amateur actor Pierre Blaise.
Karl Korn ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) spoke of a “bold attempt” to come to terms with the French past, without pushing for “moralizing indignation” . “The beauty of the film makes the terrible palpable. Anyone who grants the film the proper right of the language of art will not only not deny the work its political and moral quality, but will value it all the more because, in the sense of Flaubert , it understands beauty as the terrible beginning, ” says Korn.
Awards
Lacombe, Lucien has won several film prizes, especially in English-speaking countries, and has been nominated for others. At the US National Board of Review Awards ceremony at the end of December 1974, Holger Löwenadler was honored for his portrayal of Albert Horn as Best Supporting Actor, the film together with Amarcord ( Best Foreign Language Film ), The Pedestrian , The Specter of Freedom and Scenes one Marriage voted one of the best foreign films. In 1975 nominations for the Golden Globe Award and the Oscar in the category Best Foreign Language Film followed , while Löwenadler received the Supporting Actor Award from the American National Society of Film Critics . In the same year, Lacombe, Lucien was awarded the Prix Méliès of the Association Française de la Critique de Cinéma for best film, while three nominations for the Stella Award ( best film , best director , best) at the British Society of Film and Television Arts Awards Script) followed. Male's directorial work won the British Film Award in the Best Picture category and was also honored with the United Nations Award , a special prize from the United Nations .
literature
- Malle, Louis; Modiano, Patrick: Lacombe Lucien . Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
- Malles, Louis; French, Philip (ed.): Louis Malle on Louis Malle . Berlin: Alexander-Verl., 1998. - ISBN 3-89581-009-6 .
Web links
- Lacombe, Lucien in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Malles, Louis; French, Philip (ed.): Louis Malle on Louis Malle . Berlin: Alexander-Verl., 1998. - ISBN 3-89581-009-6 . P. 315.
- ↑ Malles, Louis; French, Philip (ed.): Louis Malle on Louis Malle . Berlin: Alexander-Verl., 1998. - ISBN 3-89581-009-6 . Pp. 128-129
- ↑ a b Malles, Louis; French, Philip (ed.): Louis Malle on Louis Malle . Berlin: Alexander-Verl., 1998. - ISBN 3-89581-009-6 . P. 129
- ^ Documentary L'histoire d'un salaud / The story of a bastard (Allerto films, 2005). 9:00 min ff., Included on the German DVD for sale ( Arthaus Filmvertrieb , 2008)
- ^ Documentary L'histoire d'un salaud / The story of a bastard (Allerto films, 2005). 3:40 min ff., Contained on the German DVD for sale (Arthaus Filmvertrieb, 2008)
- ^ Documentary L'histoire d'un salaud / The story of a bastard (Allerto films, 2005). 5:00 min ff., Included on the German DVD for sale (Arthaus Filmvertrieb, 2008)
- ↑ Lacombe, Lucien . In: film-dienst 07/1974 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
- ^ Korn, Karl: Lacombe Lucien . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 11, 1974, p. 20
- ↑ Winner 1974 ( Memento of the original from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at nbrmp.org (accessed July 21, 2012)
