Au revoir, les enfants (1987)
Directed by Louis Malle

Film Review

On his return to France in 1986 after a productive decade of filmmaking in the United States, Louis Malle immediately set about making what was to be his most personal film, one which drew heavily on his childhood experiences during WWII. Throughout most of his life, Malle had been haunted by his recollection of the fateful day in January 1944 when he witnessed three Jewish pupils at the boarding school he was attending being taken away by German soldiers.  His chief regret was that he had not had the opportunity to become acquainted with any of the three boys, and it is this which, he claimed, guided him towards a career in filmmaking.  Au revoir, les enfants is the film that Louis Malle had longed to make, a poignant examination of the joys and traumas of early adolescence set against the backdrop of the darkest period in French history.

This was not the first time Louis Malle had visited the era of the Nazi Occupation.  In 1974, he whipped up a storm of controversy with Lacombe Lucien, an intimate portrait of a teenager who turns collaborator for personal advantage.  Au revoir, les enfants covers similar ground, and even presents a character (the kitchen helper Joseph) who might well be a near relation of the treacherous Lucien.  It is interesting that in both films Malle tacitly avoids taking a moral position.  Instead of apportioning blame to individuals and looking for easy scapegoats, he paints a far more complex and ambiguous picture.  Not all of the Nazis are monsters: in one memorable scene, German officers intervene to prevent French militia from haranguing an old Jewish man; in another, German soldiers come to the rescue of the two main child protagonists, returning them safely to their school after they have been left behind in the course of a treasure hunt.  If we must look for reasons for the Holocaust, we will achieve nothing by attributing it to the evil a few misguided individuals - human nature is far more subtle and complicated than this.

It is significant that Au revoir, les enfants coincided with a period in which the French nation had at last begun to come to terms with the Occupation and, more crucially, its role in Hitler's Final Solution.  In previous decades, most French people had clung to the De Gaulle myth that France had been a nation of resistance during the Occupation; it took many years for the less palatable truth to come out and become accepted.  Malle's film is a succinct expression of the guilt that was beginning to be felt in France by the late 1980s for its part in the Holocaust.  The sequence at the end of the film - in which the main character Julien (Malle's alter ego) unintentionally betrays his friend Jean and watches helplessly as he is taken away to certain death at the hands of the Nazis - is highly symbolic, expressing not merely Malle's sense of guilt, but the guilt of a nation that had been unwittingly complicit in one of the most infamous crimes in human history.  It is right that we should follow Julien's example and shed a tear as he watches his friend being dragged to his doom.

In the course of his long career, Louis Malle made several important films about the traumas of childhood and adolescence, from the exuberant comedy Zazie dans le métro (1960) to the highly controversial teen drama Pretty Baby (1978). Because it impinges so greatly on Malle's own experiences, Au revoir, les enfants is the one film in this series that has a particular resonance and deserves to rank alongside François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959) as the most authentic screen depiction of early adolescence.  The film owes much of its charm and immediacy to the vivid portrayal of the two main characters (the 12-year-old boys Julien Quentin and Jean Bonnet) by Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejto, neither of whom had any prior acting experience.  In too many films, child actors are over-directed and tend to come across as self-conscious and stilted; Manesse and Fejto are quite the opposite: they hardly look as if they are acting at all.  There is not a single scene in the film that does not ring true, and the sequences in which Julien and Jean begin to develop a mutual respect and friendship are particularly stirring, stingingly naturalistic in a way that mainstream cinema very rarely is.   The only thing to take the bitter edge off the coldness of the rural setting (which is emphasised by the muted palette of greys and dull browns) is the warmth of Julien's friendship with Jean.  Surely there is no other film that is anywhere near as evocative of the gloom of the Occupation as this, a perpetual bleak winter's day seen through the eyes of children whose bones are chilled with a fear they cannot account for.

The character of Jean Bonnet is based on Hans-Helmut Michel, one of the three Jewish boys that Malle saw being arrested by Nazis during his stay at the Roman Catholic boarding school Petit-College d'Avon in 1944.  Michel was just 13 when he died at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.  The school headmaster Père Jean is also closely modelled on a real person, Père Jacques, who was arrested by the Nazis for sheltering Jewish boys in the college and ended up at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died shortly after the camp was liberated by the Allies.  Malle had originally intended to title the film My Little Madeleine, a reference to Proust's memory-provoking madeleine in À la recherche du temps perdu. In reality, Malle did not befriend any of the three Jewish boys he saw arrested, but later wished he had.  His film can be seen as an attempt to correct for that past omission, to portray events as Malle wished they had happened, perhaps to justify his guilt for the arrest of the Jewish boys, perhaps to make him feel more personally involved with the Holocaust.

Malle's first French language film since the distinctly ill-received Lacombe Lucien (1974) and Black Moon (1975), Au revoir, les enfants proved to be one of the director's biggest successes, both critically and commercially.  The film attracted an audience of 3.5 million in France (making it the most popular French film of the year) and was a box office hit in the United States.  In 1988, it was nominated for nine Césars, winning awards in seven categories that included Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.  It also took the coveted Prix Louis-Delluc and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1987. The film was also nominated for two Oscars in 1988, for the Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay.  The immense success of Au revoir, les enfants helped to restore Malle's badly tarnished reputation in France at a time when many critics had ceased to regard him as a serious filmmaker.  Despite this, Louis Malle would only make one more film in France, Milou en mai (1990), another nostalgia trip set in turbulent times, that memorable spring of 1968...

Film Synopsis

France, 1944, during the Nazi Occupation.  The Christmas holidays over, 12-year-old Julien Quentin must leave his comfortable middleclass home in Paris and return to his Catholic boarding school in the country.  Shortly after his arrival, Father Jean, the school's headmaster, introduces three new boys, one of whom, Jean Bonnet, takes a bed next to Julien in the crowded dormitory.  At first, Julien cannot help disliking Jean, a withdrawn boy who is a natural target for bullies and who shows a special aptitude for several subjects.  But gradually a friendship starts to develop between the two boys.  They find they have a shared love of books and music, and both have lost contact with their father.  One day, Julien makes a shocking discovery: Jean is not the Protestant French boy he pretends to be, but a Jew, hiding from the Nazis under an assumed name...