Lacombe, Lucien

Lacombe, Lucien (1974) is Louis Malle's wartime drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. It's the summer of 1944 in occupied southern France. A seventeen-year-old farm boy mops floors at a hospital, bored and going nowhere, until he decides to join the Resistance fighters in the hills. They turn him away — he's too young.

Stung by the rejection, Lucien drifts almost by accident into the local arm of the Gestapo, where the welcome is warm. Guns, requisitioned apartments, neighbours who flinch when he walks in: a boy with no ideas and no convictions discovers he likes the power of informing and raiding. Then he falls for France Horn, the daughter of a hiding Jewish tailor, and his own job boxes him in. Pierre Blaise, a non-professional cast off the street, plays that blank face of evil in a way that chills.

Malle wrote the script with Patrick Modiano, a future Nobel laureate, and deliberately refused to explain his lead: collaboration here grows out of boredom, spite and chance rather than belief. The film set off a furore in France, yet it was up for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and has long sat among the essential portraits of complicity. Slow, heavy and mercilessly honest, it's for viewers ready for a story with no easy answers. Stream Lacombe, Lucien (1974) online on iFILM.