Lacombe, Lucien 1974

June 1944, as the Allies push into Normandy, Lucien Lacombe, a 17-year-old country boy, tries to join the Resistance. The local Resistance leader, the village school teacher, declines him for his age. He bikes back to town and stumbles upon the hotel that serves as the Carlingue’s headquarters and is taken into custody. Under the influence of alcohol, he betrays the teacher, who is brought in and tortured. Seeing his usefulness, the Carlingue recruits him into their lawless regime of extortion and terror.

Lucien enjoys his new power but falls in love with France Horn, a beautiful French-born Jewish girl living in seclusion with her father Albert Horn, a tailor, and her paternal grandmother Bella, who left Paris in fear and are trying to cross into neutral Spain. Their sophistication stands in contrast to Lucien’s rough, uneducated nature. He forces himself into a relationship with the girl and grows protective of the very people targeted by his superiors. He is warned that the Allies are winning and that, as a collaborator, he could be killed.

Albert goes to Carlingue headquarters to discuss his daughter’s relationship, but is taken into custody and handed over to the Germans. After a Resistance attack on the hotel, the town’s inhabitants are rounded up in retaliation. Lucien and a German soldier arrest France Horn and Bella, but Lucien chooses to kill the soldier. They drive the women toward Spain, but the car breaks down and they press on on foot to shelter in a secluded, abandoned farmhouse.

An epilogue notes that Lucien Lacombe was arrested on October 12, 1944, tried by a Resistance military tribunal, and executed.