AU REVOIR LES ENFANTES
[Goodbye, Children]
A Film Review by Manavendra K. Thakur
Copyright 1988 by Manavendra K. Thakur and The Tech.
Reproduced with permission.
1987 103 mins. France-FRG French with English Subtitles Rated PG Dolby Stereo Color 35mm/1.66
Cast: Gaspard Manesse, Raphael Fejto, Francine Racette, Stanislas Carre de Malberg, Philippe Morier-Genoud, Francois Berleand, Francois Negret, Peter Fitz, Pascal Rivet, Benoit Henriet, Richard Leboeuf, Xavier Legrand, Arnaud Henriet, Jean-Sebastian Chauvin, Luc Etienne, Daniel Edinger, Marcel Bellot, Ami Flammer, Irene Jacob, Jean-Paul Dubarry, Jacqueline Staup, Jacqueline Paris.
Credits: Written, Produced, and Directed by Louis Malle. Associate Producer: Christian Ferry. Cinematography: Renato Berta. Art Direction: Willy Holt. Costume Designer: Corinne Jorry. Sound: Jean-Claude Laureux. Editor: Emmanuelle Castro. Production Manager: Gerald Molto. Music: Schubert--Moment Musical No. 2; Saint-Saens--Rondo Capricioso. (Violin: Ami Flammer; Piano: J. F. Heisser.)
Studio: Nouvelles Editions de Films S.A. (Paris) / M.K.2. Productions (Paris)/
Stella Film GmbH (Munich) / N.E.F. GmbH (Munich)
Distributor (North America): Orion Classics
711 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10022
(212) 758-5100
Every detail of the events on January 15, 1944, has become etched into Louis Malle's memory. On that tragic day, an 11-year-old Louis Malle and his fellow students in a Catholic school fifty miles south of Paris watched as the local Gestapo chieftain arrested three of their Jewish classmates along with Father Jacques, the school's headmaster who had hidden the Jewish boys for over a year.
Now, more than forty years later after the Nazis sent the four to their deaths, Louis Malle shares this most intimate and troubling memory of his childhood in his newest film, AU REVOIR LES ENFANTES (GOODBYE, CHILDREN), which he wrote, produced, and directed. No other filmmaker in recent memory has bared his or her soul to the bone more movingly and more convincingly than Louis Malle has done in this film. By focusing his film only on the specific events he witnessed that led up to that fateful day, Louis Malle's film becomes the rarest of rarities: a film that is intensely personal and deeply moving, yet does not degenerate into vacuous melodrama or political polemic. The simple and unrelenting honesty of his film transforms Louis Malle's personal catharsis into an experience of universal and profoundly human dimensions.
Literally, the title refers to the farewell that Father Jacques (renamed Father Jean in the film) utters to the students as he's being led away by the Germans, but metaphorically it heralds the end of Louis Malle's own childhood innocence. Through the eyes of Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse), Louis Malle depicts his introduction to the harsh realities from which his upper-middle class background had sheltered him. The loss of innocence begins in the very first scene as Julien prepares to board the train that will take him to the school. He can't stand the thought of leaving Paris, and he tells his mother that he hates her for making him go. Her response is to hug and kiss him. It is a poignant moment, but Julien's outburst points to the tensions that have already been created within him by the war, tensions that will develop and express themselves later.
From there, the film shifts to the school itself, where Julien forgets about the outside world and goes about being a studious and playful seventh grader. He reads novels after hours with a flashlight, plays pranks on other children, and cavorts on stilts in the schoolyard during recess. During these scenes, Louis Malle creates an almost perfect aura of boarding school life, complete with the children's token adherence to religious rituals and gripes about the food being good only when parents come to visit. By relying on the natural responses of his young actors, Malle captures youthful bravados and mannerisms with the same astounding resonance of Francois Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS, and indeed a scene of the schoolchildren marching through the streets creates a powerful sense of deja vu.
What primarily distinguishes Louis Malle's depiction from the spate of recent coming-of-age films, however, is that Julien is neither a child claiming to be an adult nor an adult pretending to be a child. When the three young boys arrive at the school, one of them, Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto) is assigned the bed next to Julien's. Julien acts just as a typical tough kid would: he introduces himself by saying "I'm Julien. Don't mess with me." But while he joins in the boys' pranks and teasing, Julien also finds himself intrigued by the quiet, reserved manner in which Jean bears all the abuse. Little by little, a shaky friendship with numerous ups and downs develops between them. Their friendship becomes cemented when the two find themselves lost in the woods as they search for a treasure during a scouting game. Frightened and cold, they are found on a highway by three soldiers on patrol in a jeep, who return them to the school. What Julien can't understand is why Jean tried to run when he realized that the soldiers were German. After Julien discovers that Jean's real last name is Kippelstein, he eventually realizes that Jean is Jewish -- but even then has to ask his brother what it means to be Jewish. Julien is now at a seminal point in his maturity, where he cradles an already emerging adult awareness with his yet potent youthful exuberance.
Louis Malle's heartfelt construction of this child/adult balance is at the core of the film's success. By the end of the film, the viewer does not merely sympathize with the two boys as the Gestapo make their arrests at the school. Rather, the audience empathizes so thoroughly with the two boys' experience that their ordeal becomes the viewer's as well. The film's final shots convey the full emotional weight of the bond between Julien and Jean that has been so sharply cut, but those shots do not degenerate into tearjerker sentiment because the audience feels the hurt caused by the arbitrariness and extent of the Nazi's evil as though it had been aimed personally against the viewer. Few films manage to link its characters with the audience so closely as Malle's convincing and even-handed portrayal of the array of human weaknesses and strengths.
And Malle gives the film a tremendous thematic scope to the film as well as depth, which contributes further to Julien's loss of innocence. Joseph (Francois Negret), an orphan who works in the school's kitchen, runs a black market where the children can trade their food from home for cigarettes and dirty books. When the scam is discovered, Joseph is fired while the students who collaborated with him are merely reprimanded due to their family prestige. Joseph repays this acknowledged injustice by the same act that Louis Malle explored in his 1974 film LACOMBE LUCIEN, and it is just as inexplicable and appropriate here as it was in that film. Julien cannot believe his eyes when he discovers what his friend has done.
In another scene, Jean Bonnet joins Julien and his family for a Sunday lunch outing. While they are eating, two French militiamen enter and begin to harass an elderly distinguished gentleman who is in the restaurant illegally. While most of the patrons grumble some support for the gentleman, it is none other than a Nazi officer who seizes the initiative and throws the militiamen out. The enormous moral implications about the acquiescence to evil begin to dawn on Julien (and the audience) when a surprised diner's exclamation that not all Germans are bad is immediately followed by a cynical comment that the Nazi officer was really just grandstanding in front of Julien's attractive mother. Jean, meanwhile, remains still as a mouse; he's seen it all before, and he displays virtually no sign of how quietly desperate his life has become.
It is through repeated scenes such as these that Louis Malle establishes unique and moral complexities within which Julien comes of age. Watching Julien explore these contradictions is never tiresome -- even though the audience knows in advance the inevitable outcome -- because of the natural and believable ensemble performances. Louis Malle likes to work with inexperienced young actors, and in this film, he draws upon their natural inclinations and reactions so masterfully that the distinction between actor and character is erased. Louis Malle's film creates not a flat stage for the actors to work on, but rather a fully articulated and three-dimensional world for the characters to inhabit and live in. The balance between the narrative and its context is impeccable.
It is quite fortunate that Louis Malle waited all these years to make this film because the perspective gained from that experience enabled him to crystallize all his humanity and all his filmmaking skills into a solid film that defies trivialization or dismissal. And because he has fictionalized certain scenes and details while remaining thoroughly true to what he calls "the most tragic memory of my childhood," his film involves the audience in a manner that no documentary or polemic could hope to equal. Louis Malle has shown that despite the staggering amount that has been written already, there yet remains much to say and remember about the horrors of the Nazi era. One has to return to THE GRAND ILLUSION, THE SEVEN SAMURAI, and the films of Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray to find similarly moving portraits of the human condition. A film like AU REVOIR LES ENFANTES arrives only rarely, a precious event that will be remembered for years to come by those who witness its birth.
Manavendra K. Thakur
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thakur@eddie.mit.edu
thakur@athena.mit.edu
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