From the start of his career in the early days of the French Nouvelle Vague, Louis Malle achieved his reputation as a provocative, controversial filmmaker. His 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien, is no exception. Like many of his other films, Lacombe Lucien broke not only cinematic but also social taboos; the film, which tells the story of a peasant boy who becomes involved in the French collaboration, helped to destroy the collective black-and-white perception of the resistance and collaboration movements in France (best illustrated by Jean-Paul Sartre’s rather uninformed statement: “All the workers and almost all the peasants were resisters; most collaborators… came from the bourgeoisie”[1]) which was (and remains to be) a controversial topic. The theme of collaboration was such a taboo that it had been virtually untouched by filmmakers in France, until Marcel Olphus’ documentary Le Chagrin et La Pitié[2], released in in 1971 – only one year before Lacombe Lucien. Olphus, like many of the film’s viewers and critics, was shocked by the film’s both political and individual ambiguities[3], and by the absence of any moral judgement. One more favourable critic suggests that Malle masterfully makes the viewer uncomfortable with the film’s occasional humour: by laughing, one inevitably identifies, to some extent, with the characters, [4] many of whom one would generally not want to relate to. The ambiguous portrayal of the collaborateur is evoked most notably through the protagonist, Lucien. An analysis of this portrayal first requires a synopsis of the film’s plot. The film is set in a village in southwestern France. Lucien Lacombe finishes his work at the hospital and returns to his native village for the holidays, to find that his mother has taken the landlord, Monsieur Laborit, as a lover while her husband, Lucien’s father, has been taken prisoner in Germany. After Laborit mentions that his own son has joined the Maquis, Lucien tries to join the resistance himself. He