It affects him at home, where his mother lives with her lover (his father is missing in action). It affects him at work, where he labors in his boring job at the hospital. A lot of the young men in the town are members of the underground resistance movement. They carry guns, are involved in secret schemes and don't have to mop floors. Lucien approaches the local resistance and asks to join, but he's turned away because he's too young. He wants desperately (if "desperately" isn't too strong a word for such a taciturn character) to break the mold of his life, and since the resistance won't have him, he joins the local Gestapo.
Now he gets to carry a gun (even a machine gun), and he has money in his pocket. It's a good job, as jobs go. He doesn't seem, at first, or even afterwards, to have given much thought to the moral issues involved. He doesn't see himself as a traitor to France, or a collaborator with the evil of Nazism, but as a person of some consequence through his power to order and bully. He likes the work.
And that seems to be an underlying theme of Louis Malle's “Lacombe, Lucien”, which is one of a growing number of works examining the role played by ordinary Frenchmen during the German occupation. Marcel Ophuls' landmark documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity" (1970) first broke this ground two years ago, destroying the myth that most Frenchmen listened faithfully to de Gaulle's broadcasts from London, while only a handful were collaborators. Ophuls' “Hotel Terminus” (1987) made the point again in 1987. The truth, Marcel Ophuls and Louis Malle seem to be saying, is that a lot of ordinary people simply went along, passively, because they were so accustomed to obeying authority that they preferred the Germans to the bother of making up their own minds. That was part of what Ophuls had to say, and now, Malle offers a more provocative statement.
His “Lucien” is a case study of a young man of almost total selfishness, who betrays his people and joins the Gestapo primarily to make things easier for himself. His error, of course, is that he becomes a collaborator at a point in the war when the Germans are clearly going to lose. But his horizons aren't wide enough to take account of those faraway possibilities.
His life becomes complicated, however, when he uses the power of the Gestapo to move into a comfortable house in the town that's being occupied by a Jewish tailor from Paris, his mother and his attractive young daughter. These people are of an intelligence and sophistication beyond a simple thug like Lucien, but in some backward way, he develops a grudging affection for them. He bullies them around, his machine gun having provided a personality where none existed before. But then he falls in love with the girl, and she with him.
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