Marie-Claude Treilhou | Simone Barbès ou la vertu (Simone Barbès, or Virtue) / 1980

successfully navigating a crazy world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Delahaye and Marie-Claude Treilhou (screenplay), Marie-Claude Treilhou (director) Simone Barbès ou la vertu (Simone Barbès, or Virtue) / 1980

 

This truly memorable lesbian drama begins in a heterosexual male porno house in Montparnasse where Simone (Ingrid Bourgoin), dressed in a half-sleaved black blouse and blank leather pants and Martine (Martine Simonet), wearing a loosely fitting yellow dress, work in the lobby as ushers making sure their male customers have tickets and find the appropriate theaters, no mean tasks, since these lonely and horny, mostly middle-aged men like to wonder the halls and try out several porno films for the price of one. Some are regulars, expecting special treatment, others are just occasional porn goers, but all are obviously without women in their lives or, even more likely, cheating on their dissatisfied spouses who wait at home.

     In fact, one of those unhappy spouses might describe Martine, who has been late to work in attempting to settle a dispute with her long-time boyfriend who, while she is off at work, is clearly cheating on her.

    Simone is angry, not just for the fact that Martine is often late, leaving her to do the dirty work, but because her friend is not intelligent enough to step out of her abusive relationship, despite the knowledge she must certainly have regarding the inconsequentiality of the male sex giving her nightly encounters.

    Martine is clearly a lost romantic, always ready to excuse these lonely, lost men who smell up the place with their bodies and cum, so that Simone is forced every so often to spray down the movie halls with a freshener.

    Fortunately, director Marie-Claude Treilhou, out host into a world of failed men, never allows us to enter any of the porno halls. We merely hear the moans and groans of the porn screen maidens who are constantly being told by male voices that they should like it and take it harder.

    The men who do stop by and talk to our ushers are all somewhat deranged, one named the Marquis who pretends to be an aesthete of the porn film genre, commenting on the female porn stars as if they were consummate actors whose performances are worthy of his judgment. Another man hides outside of the obviously more expensive theater, waiting his turn to sneak in. Yet another complains that the movie he’s been watching has queer scenes and that the men in the theater are jacking of together.

     A new visitor (Noël Simsolo) claims to be one of the porn directors, demanding to get in free—the women demand a ticket—and after having seen the film complains that its ratio is all wrong and that the theater is showing a bad print, outrageous, he screams, arguing that even the Belgians do it better than the French.

    In short, even the men we do meet in this world, are foolish at best, and more likely utterly insane. It is the women who direct our focus as they share baguettes of pâté and drinks of cheery liquor which Simone brings from a foray to from a nearby bar. But even that short adventure into the outside world results in her bringing back with her absurd tales of a mad legionnaire and a woman pretending she were an actress from the nearby Comédie-Française—an institution that becomes almost a subtext in this work, with the supposedly uneducated Simone often quoting Moliere—who has evidently confused her melodramatic theater acting with events in real life, playing out later, even on the streets, an estranged wife to the imaginary legionnaire husband who can’t comprehend a world of what she’s talking about.

     Some of the commentators and film reviewers found this first section of the film’s tri-partite structure slow going, but I found it absolutely enchanting, focusing as it does on a real relationship between the two female coworkers who, despite their vast differences, have bonded through their job to become legitimate friends who, unlike nearly everyone else in this film, can openly share their love and criticism for and of one another.

   In this usually male dominated world, strangely enough it is out two women—sitting under the strange visual image of two yellow neon eyes, the idea of cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, trying to find a set where everything had to be kept to a minimum since the small-budgeted movie was using the space on the down-hours of the real porno theater—who provide us with any sense of meaning or order. The men who come here have no real sexual lives and cannot even communicate in what might be described as a reasonable dialogue. But the women bring life to this otherwise desolate spot, breathing out a sense of air, particularly the implacable Simone, that is fresher than any spray she might employ to get rid of the lingering stink of the male clients.

     Magically at midnight everything shifts as Simone moves away, climbing a mysterious red staircase into another world of a lesbian bar which she visits not so much out of interest as to bring home her lover, who works there is a somewhat similar role, dressed up as a waiter, but who in reality is an escort whose job it is to flirt with other female customers with the goal of encouraging to order up drinks, sometimes even magnums of champagne.

    Standing close to the bar and the seemingly normal male bartender—although at one point even he attempts to cast a magic spell over the place to ward out the evil in he feels in the air on this night. Surrounding her throughout the bar is a kind of enchanted chaos, as crazy as the small bar she previously visited, but just slightly more explicable and contained.

     Elisabeth Lebovici, who was there for the original shoot, quickly summarizes events:

 

“Simone goes there to wait for her girlfriend, who, it is suggested, is an escort. As Simone hangs around, Jackie, one of the sub-hostesses, tries to flog her a cooker; the women’s band plays; a punk singer gets worked up in a series of dodgy rhymes as patrons look on indifferently; women dance and flirt; a man is killed; and Simone gets bored waiting. Asked to look after a pampered couple by Jackie, Simone’s girlfriend keeps asking her to postpone her departure before telling her to call later.”

 

     But that doesn’t at all get to the heart of this very special bar in a day when lesbians and a few men of all ages, different perspectives, and various inclinations had little choice to gather in a sort of melting pot of gay female sexuality. In those days clearly there no niche bars for dykes who like femmes, or proper granny lesbian waltzers, or where wealthy women who preferred their own company to the men to whom they were wed to escape: they all climbed the same red magic staircase and spoke the magic words for entry.

    The major performers consist of a small contingent of older women who might have been at home in the lesbian bars of Berlin in the early 1930s, playing on everything from a muted drum, a keyboard transformer, and congo drums Brechtian-like songs that mostly attract the leftover lesbian working girls and previous librarians who dance slow waltzes while around them trot other modernized women in red vinyl dresses and contemporary pants and blouse pairings. On the edges sit the grand dames of another era, sometimes surrounded by one or two gay boys, either their admirers or husbands. A truly wealthy woman with her obviously obliging hubby grandly enters for her monthly or quarterly visit to the spot; she is given a special spot from which others have been asked to vacate.

     Meanwhile, the punk artist screams out her naughty lyrics, “If I’m butch it’s to protect my beef, if I’m butch it’s to defend my snatch.”

     The two woman gladiators in more revealing garb, one of them apparently Simone’s girlfriend, play out a carefully choreographed battle with swords.

      Actually, in its crazy diversity and busy goings-on, it seems to be the kind of bar I would love to spend some time in. But men are simply playthings here and likely to get killed if they take any serious action; after the murder, the wealthy grande dame and her husband are carefully escorted out before the police are called.

      Surely Simone would have loved to have shot down the male guest who tells her that she doesn’t smile enough. But then, the one thing we have come to realize by this time in the film is that Simone is a strong survivor, with no need of protection or even aggressive actions; she is in control of herself and the situation at all times, a woman who might almost remind us of a far less put upon Jeanne Dielman of Chantal Ackerman’s film of just five years earlier. No need to put any sharp weapon into a sleazy man’s neck.

     Recognized by almost all the regulars as a force, Simone attracts them to her for various reasons without having to even abandon her post by the bar which she maintains until she is so bored and simply disinterested in the goings-on that she decides to take off, leaving her girlfriend to promise to contact her the next day.

    But now, long after hours, she must endure the walk home. And even then, on the empty streets, she is not entirely free of men who might attempt to pick up a late night female stroller. One such individual (Cahiers du cinéma critic and co-screenwriter Michel Delahaye) keeps trying to block her path with his car.

    Peering in to see a well-dressed man in a moustache, Simone agrees to get in for a drive home—but only if she can drive. As he attempts to invite her up to a friend’s apartment for a drink, she assures him that she’ll find an open bar where she’ll treat him; but of course at this late hour there is no such open bar.

    As she engages him in conversation, it comes more and more apparent even to him that she is not only controlling the situation but that she has no intentions of granting any sexual advances or even a kiss. Gradually, his own masks are revealed as he admits that he is a Swiss croupier and finally, in tears, that even his moustache is not real.

    Simone reaches her destination the very moment, evidently quite by accident in the shoot so Lebovici tells us, when the streets light click off, leaving the poor empty-handed and -headed male to drive home alone. Yet surely Simone has left him with a gift of truly heartfelt conversation deeper than any other that he might have found.

     By the end of the night even—or perhaps I should say particularly—any gay feminist like myself will have fallen in love with Simone, with utterly no intentions of taking her to bed, confessing any heartfelt secrets, or even attempting to get to know her better. If I wore a hat, as many still do in the movies, I’d simply tip it to her and nod “hoorah!” She is truly a virtuous woman who has found a way in the crazy society in which she lives to remain true to herself. Her girlfriend will surely come around and they’ll have hot sex. And then, well the ball remains in Simone’s court. I hope she finds what she wants.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

 

Julian Cole | Ostia / 1988

what is this thing called love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julian Cole (screenwriter and director) Ostia / 1988

 

There’s never been a short film (of only 26 minutes) quite like Julian Cole’s 1987 faux documentary of the death of the great Italian filmmaker, poet, and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini.

    First of all, though it is based on some factual evidence, it presents its own theory of how the young boy Pino Pelosi (David Dipnall) might have been involved with others in the killing of Pasolini, a man not only reviled for being homosexual in an often homophobic society and well-known for his late-night sexual activities with boys, but hated by the Italian rightists for his Communist-leaning political ideology.

    Secondly, the film makes absolutely no attempt to be authentic in terms of its locale, relocating Ostia, the port city of ancient Rome to London and its suburbs.

    Finally, there is no film I am aware of where a major filmmaker, in this case British director Derek Jarman, gives testament to another great 20th century filmmaker through performing him in a film presentation. The closest one might get to such a noted actor playing a renowned figure is perhaps Orson Welles’ enactment of William Randolph Hearst. But that was mostly a negative and gigantically outsized representation, while Jarman’s is a positive and loving, even if painful presentation a man tormented by the recognition that he and his generation have been, in part, responsible for making the young very young street monsters who mindlessly seek out wealth, fiends who he finds so beautiful and desirable that he wants to engage them in sex.

    This rather admirable portrait of Pasolini, recognizes that in that his very engagement with the youth of the day—who imagine they are survivors but may be actually, as Pasolini wonders of the young Pelosi, gasping for their very last breath—are a danger to his own survival. But, obviously, in his philosophical approach to a sado-masochistic world, that is the very appeal of taking such chances, of picking up street boys who are well aware that their very rough and cold exteriors, their uncouth behavior and rude manners are precisely what make the refined intelligentsia like Pasolini so attracted to them.

    This film was made just after Jarman himself discovered that he was HIV-positive and shot during the same period when he and Tilda Swinton her collaborating on his screed against the end of English culture and the mean politics of Margaret Thatcher, The Last of England.

    Yet for all that, Jarman’s performance of Pasolini represents a rather complex layering of intellectual and sexual inquisitiveness, a laid-back sense of humor for the sequence of events that lead him to pick-up Pelosi and engage him in sex which he quickly realizes has become an act of violence, and, finally, a strong sense of cultural exhaustion and a resultant decadence—not so dissimilar to the way many of us today face the daily dictates of Trump or even the way so many intellectual Germans must have perceived Hitler in the late 1930s. Pasolini’s own informing model, clearly, is the fascist rise of Mussolini about whom Pasolini had filmed his dreadful testament in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, made the very year of his murder at 53 in 1975, referenced in the film by posters seen in Cole’s film behind the bevy of rent boys he briefly encounters before, soon after, picking up Pelosi.

    That truly remarkable scene—just before he picks up Pino Pelosi, accordingly to this version, right after having been tortured to help in the killing—wherein Jarman/Pasolini drives through a London pick-up spot for gay street boys, reveals youth who not only perform brief enactments of what they have to offer, pull down their zippers to let their cocks hang out, plant kisses on the windows of the passing cars, but mock their own sexual come-ons, turning the whole “come-and-get-me” affair into almost a drag travesty, truly transforming what might have otherwise been a simple lean against the wall to advertise their availability, into an absurd performance that was so appropriate to the period that produced what Ronald Tavel called “The Theatre of the Ridiculous,” a time in which, as he described it, “We have passed beyond the absurd: our position is absolutely preposterous.”

    Some of what I presume are younger commentators observe that this scene was so ahead of its time; while I would argue it was simply very much of its hour.* These things really happened, making this short work also a rather remarkable document of the period. Would that all student films were as was as brilliant as Julian Cole’s.

 

*I still recall almost a full two decades before this, in 1969, when I arrived in New York City and was temporarily living in the Sloane House YMCA, one slightly older and wiser queen telling me, “Honey, you go to some streets the boys not only will let you know that they’re fully available to fulfill your desires, they show you what you desire.”

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Bruce Bellas | Patio Antics / c. 1960 || Shaping Up / c. 1960 || Look Me Over / c. late 1950s || Robbery on Oak Hill / c. 1960 || Cowboy Wash Up / 1965

boys’ companion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles) (director) Patio Antics / c. 1960

Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles) (director) Shaping Up / c. 1960

Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles) (director) Look Me Over / c. late 1950s

Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles) (director) Robbery on Oak Hill / c. 1960

Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles) (director) Cowboy Wash Up / 1965

 

Bruce Bellas, better known as Bruce of Los Angeles, was one of the most noted of what is described as the “Beefcake” photographers and directors. From the 1940s to his death in 1974 at age 65 Bellas photographed—mostly in posing straps with beach balls, globes, and other colorful props—numerous bodybuilders and models from Steve Reeves, Bob McCune, and George Eiferman to porn stars Joe Dallesandro, Mark Nixon, and Brian Idol.

     Although he also shot a large number of frontal nudes, he is best known for his posing strap films which, by today’s standards, seem less erotic than the picture postcards you might buy on the Venice, California Beach of boys working out at the nearby Muscle Beach “Weight Pen.” Published in the equivalent of porn magazines of the day featuring figures mostly in jock and posing straps such as Adonis, Body Beautiful, Tomorrow’s Man, and Trim, the last Bruce’s own quarterly publication, these images—under the guise of representing an interest in healthy bodies, body building, and a worship of the male physique—served the gay community as a source of male imagery for goggling and masturbation. So accepted were these male-oriented publications, somewhat like the role Playboy later served the heterosexual male community, that seeing one on a table or shelf in someone’s bedroom or living room might not even raise conservative eyebrows, although everyone clearly knew their intent.  In Stephen Frears’ 2016 film, Florence Foster Jenkins, Jenkins’ pianist Cosmé McMoon barely troubles to hide his physique magazine when the heiress would-be singer (Meryl Streep) unexpectedly descends upon his dreary apartment.

     Yet his, Bob Mizer’s and other such artists’ works ultimately influenced the photography of major artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and numerous other far more serious photographers and filmmakers.

      Like Mizer and other “beefcake” photographers, Bruce of Los Angeles—who was born in Nebraska, living most of his West Coast years not in Los Angeles but in nearby Los Alamitos in Orange County—also made films, 12 of which accompany the major retrospective photographic collection of Bruce’s images Inside/Outside published by Powerhouse Books/Antinous Press in 2008.

     Of the 12, I’ve seen only 6, but I presume that those I viewed—Patio Antics, Look Me Over, Shaping Up, Swimming Hole, Robbery on Oak Hill, and Cowboy Wash Up—are representative of the full dozen. Presumably, all of these black-and-white and color films of three to four minutes, shot on a Super-8 camera, were from the mid-to-late 1960s or, in one case, possibly the late 1950s. Cowboy Wash Up was released in 1965.

     Patio Antics, featuring the model Lance Arlen, is typical of the group. A handsome, clean-cut blond man, Arlen basically spends his time in the backyard bungalow in which he is supposedly “foolishly or outrageously playing” (the meaning of “antics”) by doing various calisthenics—jumping jacks, push-ups, hand-to-toe pumps, leg-lifts, etc.—between showing off his muscles in various bodybuilder positions while dressed in a black bikini all of which is accompanied by a jazz string bass with clicking fingers. He does a handstand and a somersault. At one point he picks up a football posing in an attempt to sail a pass to an invisible linebacker. At another point he suddenly appears with a whip which he cracks three times before rolling it back up again. He turns to the camera and smiles. The end. Pretty to look at and pretty boring.

     In Shaping Up the darker-haired Phil Knight, dressed in a tight black shinny swimming suit, pretends to mow his backyard lawn and to shear a couple of branches from a nearby bush before he gives up on gardening, pulls off his shorts and, in a white posing strap, shows off his well-developed pecs by limbering up and lifting barbells. He also poses in the required bodybuilder positions, right hand extended, left arm crooked against his waist to expose the back muscles and his well-rounded buttocks.

     Suddenly he gets a yen to water some plants, the camera slowly pulling down from his frontal stance to pause at the outline of his cock locked within the strap. And of course the spray of that nozzle just has to be turned on to wash off his feet and finally full body before the 3.18 minute short ends.*     

     In Look Me Over an unidentified Italian-looking model (one commentator argues the model’s name was Joe Napoli) poses in a tight seemingly skin-colored (hard to discern since the film is in black and white) pair of pants. This time you can most definitely see the outline of his cock, and the model is quite clearly self-aware of his role of performing as beefcake. Unlike the previous two models, this boy rubs his hands across his breast, down his mid-riff and briefly across his penis before positioning himself into the standard physique stances.

      And this time there is no pretense of ordinary boy outdoor “antics,” as he coyly turns and smiles at the camera before pulling down his shorts to expose himself in the posing strap. Once again he slightly grins as the camera wanders down from his face to his feet and back up again. As he turns to display his lovely ass, he mocks a little dance of indetermination as if asking us “What do you want?” This guy is definitely playing with the camera and the viewer.

    Soon he walks over to a small rectangular posing box conveniently located nearby and sits. He spreads his legs out to further reveal his crotch before pulling his legs up to join the rest of his body on the box, appearing for a moment as if he were fully in the nude. It’s the kind of game female strippers festooned in pasties used in pretending to be more fully undressed than they truly were, the way Gypsy Rose Lee hid half of her body behind a curtain while exposing the other.

      In this case the male sits back as if perfectly happy to let the camera spend a bit more time in gazing over the sculptural object he has allowed himself to become. Eventually he lifts out his legs and with his arms and hands gradually hefts his entire body off the box while remaining in his sitting position. He raises his right leg, turning his face full to the camera and pauses before lifting up both of his legs into a V-position before coyly dropping one of them again to his side. Turning over, ass up, he raises each leg almost as in a sexual invitation, allowing the strap to openly hang below his arched body to display his balls. He knows what the voyeur in us wants as he waves goodbye, stands and, ass to the camera, pulls off his posing strap before strolling out of view.

     My guess, given the obvious striptease like playfulness of this 4.25 minute film that it is earlier than previous works featuring clean cut models who seem to be “caught” in the glory of their near-nakedness instead of actively engaging with it and us.

     Robbery on Oak Hill seems almost out of place among the works I viewed given its more narrative elements and its clearly campy presentation of a sun-tanned cowboy in a red posing strap sitting on a log while a variation of Elmer Bernstein’s introductory theme music for the GE Theatre television series of 1953-1962 thunders in the background. Obviously, since he is wearing a black hat, he’s the robber. And before you can even register that fact another man dressed in a brown hat and an identical red posing strap rides up on a horse, the robber pulling his unhidden gun, demanding the other get down and move off further down the field. This is almost like something out of the 1948 film Red River. Afterall, it’s a very nice gun.

     In the midst of their movements into the wilderness the “good” guy (he’s also got blonde curly hair while the robber is raven-haired) turns and begins to attempt to wrestle the villain to the ground. The two pretend to struggle for some while, the better to show off their lean tanned bodies. The villain almost tops the hero in the battle, turning the tussle almost into a down-and-out rustle of the good boy’s virginity, not permissible in them-thar-days.

     Of a sudden they find themselves both in a standing position and turn to camera, waving their wrists as if to say, “Enough already,” before grabbing their hats to walk off hand-in-hand into the sunset for a few feet before they both drop down to stretch out their beautiful bodies in the sun. Soon they both get to their feet again and walk directly toward the camera covering up the lens with the robber’s cowboy hat. The end. We all know how the next episode will begin.

      The best of these improbable beefcake charmers, and certainly the most well-known, is Bruce’s 1962 Cowboy Wash Up starring the hunky pretty boy Dick Dene. The hairy bare-chested cowboy wearing only denim shorts, boots, and a hat rides up on his white steed, gets down and begins to brush the horse. The music is a kind pleasant ditty with the rhythms of a cantering colt.

      Finished with the horse, he briefly brushes himself off before pulling the horse into his nearby pen. Locking up the paddock from the inside, our cowboy goes over to the small water trough, sits down, and pulls off his cowboy boots. Once finished, he stands, pulls off his denim shorts which he hangs up on a nearby post, and takes off his hat. Dressed now only in a white posing strap he rinses his hands and face, bending to display everything he’s got. He then picks up the denim shorts, rinsing and rubbing them out in the trough before wringing them out and hanging them up on the fence again. Putting his hat back on he takes up the wet shorts and pulls them on, carefully tucking in his cock before buttoning them up.

    With the wet pants on his body he exits the paddock, waddles over to a nearby rock, stares a moment into the sky—as a single strain of Sammy Fain’s and Paul Francis Webster’s 1953 hit song “Once I Had a Secret Love” (sung by Doris Day in that year’s film Calamity Jane) is heard—before laying back to dream out The End.

     If these chaste pornographic fantasies seem almost innocent today, they were thoroughly effective for an audience who had had little encounter with actual visions of flesh outside of bedroom and backseat car encounters. I think some of the Beefcake magazines must have been my very first encounter back in Iowa with male nudity; and I liked what I saw. Who needed to see an exposed cock when you could imagine it so very explicitly? These men belonged only to the holder of the magazines in which they appeared; separated and isolated from the violation of others, they were waiting just for the voyeur’s caress.

          

*The Pacific Standard Time/Bruce of LA exhibition at Poptart Galley in Los Angeles in October 2011, featured a crude remake of Shaping Up with a heavily tattooed model named Hot Croque who clumsily performed similar tasks to what Phil Knight did in the original. Clearly satiric in intent, this bald-headed, chunky, not very unattractive model goes through all of the actions for very little effect, the end almost crashing the little film down with relief.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).  

Louis Malle | Lacombe, Lucien / 1974

the wrong side of history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano (screenplay), Louis Malle (director) Lacombe, Lucien / 1974

 

Lacombe, Lucien only proves my contentions that there is something of a disconnect between French director Louis Malle’s characters and the way he portrays them. There is a kind of cold, almost documentary quality to his work that, despite the rich texture of colors and mastery of cinematography, which makes us unsympathetic to his figures. As Pauline Kael expressed this, in far more positive terms:

“We look at Blaise’s [the untrained actor who plays Lucien Lacombe] face in a different way from the way we watch a trained actor. We look into it rather than react to an actor’s performance. The enigma of a Lucien, whether he is a bullyboy of the right or the left, is the enigma of an open face and a dark, closed mind. Professional actors have the wrong kind of face for this sort of unborn consciousness, and they tend to project thoughts and feelings from the blank area. Blaise doesn’t, and we trust our readings of his silent face almost as if we were watching a documentary. We examine it in that way, and we’re more engaged than at most fictional films. There’s nothing about Lucien that one can take for granted. Even those close to him don’t feel close; his own mother (Gilberte Rivet, in a fine performance) isn’t sure how to talk to him. His incomprehensibility is a mystery we’re caught in, and Malle astutely surrounds Lucien and the girl with unfamiliar faces (actors from the theater, with little exposure in films), so that we won’t have past associations to distract us. By the end, the case of Lacombe, Lucien has been presented to us. We know the evidence on which he will be judged a traitor, and we’ve also seen how remote that term is from anything he’s ever thought about.”

    
     As Kael makes clear, this country bumpkin—who falls in love with the daughter of a Jewish tailor, Albert Horn, who is attempting to keep out of Gestapo sights, but nonetheless is forced to dress some of its men and women—doesn’t really intend to become a brutal traitor, responsible for many deaths; like so many Europeans, he simply complied to Nazi demands the same way he had been taught to comply with school teachers and the local bourgeoise. When he introduces himself to France Horn, he replies as he has been taught to, expressing his name with the conformance of a schoolboy: Lacombe, Lucien. Like so very many peasant bullies, he sees nothing wrong with taking out his slingshot and killing a beautiful bird singing out its heart in a tree next to the hospital where he scrubs floors. Chickens are kept to have their necks wrung; rabbits exist to be shot. As a farm boy, he sees no brutality in their killing. So how might he possibly be expected to comprehend the politics swirling around him?

      If the head of the local Resistance Movement, a former school teacher who finds Lucien to young (and perhaps too stupid) to join, you turn to the Gestapo. Besides, their headquarters at the Carlingue are far swankier, and the perks, open liquor, well-coifed women, and a new suit crafted by Horn (Holger Löwenadler), along with what seems like a new friendship with the man willing to use Lucien’s knowledge of locals to his advantage, beginning with the arrest of the school teacher who turned Lucien down.

      I would not describe Lucien, as does Kael, as another representation of the banality of evil—evil is never totally banal given its horrific results—but rather evidence of stupidity and rigidity of class distinctions which so often lay under those who embrace and accept that evil, much like those who strongly voted for Trump. Those folks are anything but banal; they specifically embraced the president’s politics of hatred because they, too, had been rejected and felt left out of the American Dream.

     What you do have credit Malle for, if nothing else, is showing us a figure in France, during the German occupation who was a true collaborationist, and not secretly a member of underground which, after War II, nearly everyone claimed to have been. It nothing else, Malle is far more truthful than many another director. Yet, in presenting us with yet another kind of monster, he has once more alienated us from his central figures, risking us to care for his films. One might almost describe Malle, in some stranger manner, as the Bertolt Brecht of cinema. His figures seem to be heartless and unsympathetic rather than, as directors such as Renoir, Bresson, Resnais, and so many other French filmmakers, helping us to take them to heart, even if they are outsiders or criminals.

     We may be fascinated by Malle’s criminals, wild innocents, burghers, and bourgeoise, but we seldom grow to completely like them. Lucien, we know from the start, simply chose the wrong cause, and as the director coolly announces in his end credits, he was executed as a traitor.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2018

Reprinted from World Literature Review (March 2018).