Au revoir les enfants

An elegantly crafted tale of friendship, compassion & boyhood, Au Revoir Les Enfants is a heartbreaking, poignant & tragic cinema that's actually based on the events which took place during the childhood of this film's director and is an endearing portrait of life at school, student rivalry & beauty of friendship.

Set in France during the final years of the Second World War, the events of Au Revoir Les Enfants takes place in a Catholic boarding school and is narrated through the eyes of Julien Quentin; one of the students at the school. The plot covers his relationship with a newly arrived enigmatic student with whom he's at odds at first but the two learn to get along & share a big secret.

Directed by Louis Malle, the film is nicely crafted with many details beautifully captured by its calmly moving camera. The screenplay tries to get an authentic vibe of education in Catholic schools, the conversations between its characters carry the childlike innocence & the performances by its cast, especially the child actors, becomes more captivating as the story progresses.

On an overall scale, Au Revoir Les Enfants (also known as Goodbye Children) isn't in anyway a hard-hitting or emotionally scarring cinema but the gentle manner in which it depicts its premise really makes you care for its characters, makes you wish they get away, makes you wish for a miracle & although its subject matter has been dealt in a better manner, the film is worthy of a watch for its two main characters alone.

After a few years making movies in the United States, Louis Malle returned to his native France and made "Au revoir les enfants", based on his memories of growing up in Nazi-occupied France. The movie focuses on the friendship between two boys in a Carmelite boarding school, one of whom is keeping his real identity secret.

A particularly effective scene is in the restaurant. There are some Wehrmacht officers at a table, but they keep to themselves. Then the Milice enters and orders a Jewish patron out of the restaurant. The Wehrmacht officers then order the Milice to leave. This emphasizes not only the role of the Vichy government, but also the role of the collaborators in every country that Germany occupied.

I haven't seen all of Malle's movies, but this is probably the best of his movies that I've seen. The final scene has to be one of the most chilling in cinema history. I recommend the movie.

On seeing this movie several years ago my accompanying colleagues said of the film: what a load of self-indulgent, confusing, French stylized rubbish. They bemoaned the slow pace of the film, of the 2 dimensional directing and lack of any action or violent death scenes!

Those words still linger with me now and has made me realise that perhaps a lot of the movie-going public these days feed on the latest sfx pyrotechnics, more ingenious ways of abstract killings, lots of needless sex and not letting a good intelligent story get in the way.

Films like Les Enfants are going to be even more difficult to track down if Hollywood and some of the European studios opt for the fast Buck route to riches.

Les Enfant is a truly wonderful & yet harrowing account of life in a Catholic boys boarding school during the dying embers of the Nazi occupation of France in WW2. One of the new boys happens to be Jewish but the headmaster chooses to keep such identities covert while still offering him sanctuary and an education in spite of all the risks he takes.

To be fair I know little of Louis Malle previous to this film, but I think he must have poured his life's soul into writing & directing Les Enfant.

No detail, harrowing or otherwise, is spared; we see so much beauty amongst the horrors of occupation & collaboration; but also the blossoming relationship between the two lead boys and how initial envy & hatred of the Jew is somewhat diluted by the realities that this is no infantile school game but that life and death for the Jewish boy hangs by a thread if anyone at the school should reveal his true identity.

The final moments are perhaps one of the most sad & dramatic scenes I have ever seen. These days a lot of people would be waiting for some great heroic entrance from a big movie star to sort out all the misery and leave us with a reassurance that "it really wasn't all that bad back then was it".

But there are no heroes at the end of this movie, at least not the kind of heroes Hollywood serves up. The boys in this film are the true heroes right to the very end, primarily for their spirit of humanity in the face of impossible odds.

This is the hard reality of war amongst children growing up not only in the face of their own adolescence (and all the problems that serves), but also with the dark fingered claw of Nazism hanging menacingly like the the Scythe of the Grim Reaper.

This film will move you in so many directions and will hopefully bring you back down to earth from the current Hollywood shallow circus of pap & style-over-content.

Its a difficult film to track down, and the reason for this can be attributed to the first paragraph of this review.

*****/*****

In this spellbinding film, Louis Malle is able to evoke the fear and sadness some children suffer while away from home at a boarding school, the loneliness. Yet he doesn't dwell on sentimentality but only skims it, instead peppering the scenes with the bravura and faux assertiveness of adolescents. Malle and the actors adroitly juggle circumstances and emotions. Ultimately, they capture a terrifying time in history through the eyes and uncertainty of boys who aren't as grown-up as they'd like to think.

The two main characters, Julien Quentin and Jean Bonnet, are beautifully portrayed by two very capable and talented young actors. The supporting cast is equally impressive. The film is directed with a touch of genius, and holds its own when compared to another motion picture masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987)

A wrenching, sensitive, all-too-true drama set in a gorgeous French wooded outpost during World War II. The main actors are boys, and they play their parts with unusual conviction, unexaggerated but with intensity. And the anti-Semitism that arises, though inevitable in Nazi territory, comes subtly and really stings. The movie isn't complete without this horror, but the horror is made complete by the really vivid recreation of this kind of private boys school--a period movie at its best.

Director Louis Malle has not only a message, but a sensitive feel for the medium--for making fluid the flow and background of the plots of his films. It's also a fairly complex mix of types, and you can somehow keep them all straight as it goes--as straight as you are meant to as the facts unfold. In the end, it confirms a familiar story of Nazi terror, but one that can't be told too often.