Who is he? French film director, screenwriter and producer who made over 25 films between the mid-fifties and the mid-nineties. Malle started out by assisting noted French navigator Jacques Cousteau, with whom he shared a Golden Palm at Cannes Film Festival for The Silent World in 1956. He won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival twice: for Atlantic City in 1980 and Goodbye, Children in 1987.
Why is he of interest? Though Malle is considered to be a part of the French New Wave, he has generally not enjoyed the high-minded adulation reserved for the core filmmakers of the movement. Part of the reason might be that Malle, unlike Truffaut, Godard or Chabrol, worked on a range of themes and kept adapting his style to suit the subject. His films, however, have had considerable success at the box office and with the audiences.
Where to discover him? Set during the Second World War, Lacombe, Lucien (1974) revolves around a teenage ranch hand who ends up collaborating with the occupying Nazi forces while also falling in love with a Jewish girl. Possibly Malle’s finest film, Lacombe, Lucien is a complex character study in which biology and ideology are at war and where one young man’s involuntary pursuit of power is undone by his own search for meaning through love.
