Lacombe, Lucien begins in 1944 with the title character working as a janitor at a French hospital. Soon he hears a bird chirping, looks outside to see the bird merrily singing on a tree limb and then shoots the bird with a slingshot, knocking it out of the tree and killing it. Immediately the audience knows that Lucien isn’t some mischievous teenager looking to have a little fun, such as the main character in director Louis Malle’s previous film Murmur of the Heart. As the movie progresses, we see that Lucien is a borderline sociopath who seems unable to differentiate between moral right and wrong and devoid of a conscience.

Unhappy with his janitorial job, Lucien (played by Pierre Blaise in his only major role before dying in a car wreck a year after the film’s release) returns to the countryside where his mother lives with another man. There he finds out that his father has joined the Resistance movement. When Lucien visits a schoolteacher in hopes of also joining the underground, he’s quickly rejected. By chance, he stumbles upon the local German police headquarters and doesn’t hesitate to name the teacher as the local underground leader. This act of betrayal against France provides Lucien with an opportunity to join the German police and to live a life of privilege and power. A fellow officer decides that Lucien needs a nice suit and takes him to a Jewish tailor who’s fled Paris. At the man’s home, Lucien sees the tailor’s daughter, France, and is immediately interested.

Despite his initial enthusiasm at the idea, there’s no reason to believe Lucien ever has any interest in defeating the Nazi occupation of France. The more likely explanation is that he’s simply looking for an alternative to being a hospital janitor. His motives throughout the film, in fact, are rarely clear and his loyalties are obviously malleable as evidenced by his stark turnabout from potential Resistance fighter to working for the Gestapo. Even his attachment to France, the Jewish tailor’s daughter, is somewhat perfunctory and never appears entirely genuine. Their fate in the last act seems to have more to do with a pocket watch than love.

The brilliance of Malle’s film, as illuminated in Pauline Kael’s insightful essay included with the Criterion Collection DVD, is that, despite behaving so venally, Lucien never comes across as a complete monster. He isn’t Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth character in Schindler’s List, for example. His actions, while deplorable, are not based in any hatred of Jews or love for the Nazis, nor does he seem to be looking for excitement in a Leopold & Loeb sort of way. He merely needed something else to do and the German police provided such an opportunity. The terrible things involved with the work are no different than the rabbits he shot or the chicken he killed with his hands earlier in the film. Lucien seems unable or unwilling to separate what is acceptable and what is reprehensible in his actions. There is no struggle inside him about what he’s doing or regret in what he’s done.

All of this “moral ambiguity” from the protoganist of a 138 minute film, when placed in the setting of the Holocaust, can be difficult to sit through. I found myself, having been trained by numerous other films, waiting for some kind of redemption for Lucien and frequently surprised at what I was watching. Whether any redemption actually occurs is debatable and Malle ends the film with a short epilogue as though Lucien Lacombe had been a real person. Over thirty years have passed since the initial release of Lacombe, Lucien and it remains compelling. The “banality of evil,” as Kael phrases it, never seems to go out of style and the idea that a person such as Lucien could have little or no motive for his actions is as contemporary as ever.