I wanted to write about Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien when I saw 12 Years a Slave . The brutality depicted in the latter film bothered me, and it took me back to the question I keep asking whenever I see sex and violence on screen: How much is necessary? If the intent is to inform the audience that a couple has had sex, isn’t it enough to show, say, the couple kissing and then shutting the door and then cutting to them in bed afterwards? What purpose (other than pornography) do shots of the actual act serve? So too with violence. When is it enough to merely suggest violence and when does it become necessary to show whips landing on naked backs with flesh peeling off, as in 12 Years a Slave ?
Sometimes, a filmmaker wants us to feel what the slaves felt, and one way of feeling is to flinch on seeing that whip land on that naked back and tear off that flesh – this may be nothing when compared to the flinching of the slave undergoing this torture, but at least we’re left with a physical feeling, 0.01 per cent of what that slave must have felt. (Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years a Slave , had this to say about his methods: “I love the idea of just being in real time. Being present. Being there. That was the key for me... I wanted the audience to be there. And if you put a cut in there, then it would be [like] taking the air out of a pressure cooker. It was about keeping that tension going...”)
But what bothers me is this: Is it a lesser skill to evoke a reaction in a viewer by showing him things that are guaranteed to disturb him? And if you do this, aren’t you really making a horror movie, which is the only kind of movie that seeks reactions by goosing the viewer? And will a really “evolved” and “sophisticated” filmmaker be more – what’s that word again? –
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With this background, it’s easy to understand why he was sought out by Malle to co-write Lacombe Lucien , the story of a French youth named Lucien Lacombe who joins the German police during World War II and falls in love with a Jewish girl, who’s rather pointedly named France. This is another similarity with 12 Years a Slave ; there, a plantation owner couldn’t help being attracted to one of his slaves. At one level, it’s not fair – or even very useful – comparing the two films. 12 Years a Slave is a more commercial, more Hollywoody kind of film – it’s more direct . Lacombe Lucien is made with a distinctly European sensibility – it’s classic art-house fare. 12 Years a Slave , though the story of one man, the slave referred to in the title, is also a chronicle of the times – it’s a more sprawling narrative. Lacombe Lucien is more intimate. Its actions are more confined.
But the primary point of interest is that both films depict exceedingly violent times in completely different ways. The violence in
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