In January of 1944, future film director Louis Malle's life as a young
student at a Catholic boarding school was disrupted when the school's
headmaster, Pere Jacques, was taken away by the Nazis for having harbored
four Jewish boys whom he disguised as students. The school was shut down
and the Jewish boys were sent to concentration camps. The incident
haunted Malle all his life, until in 1987 he dramatized the events in
Au Revoir Les Enfants. The film became one of the most acclaimed
in his career, winning (among other honors) the Golden Lion at the Venice
Film Festival, seven Cesar Awards (including Best Film and Best
Director), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best
Foreign Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Director. In addition, the
film was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film and
Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. The Criterion
Collection has now released
Au Revoir Les Enfants on DVD in the
United States for the first time.
Gaspard Manesse stars in Malle's fictionalized account as Julien Quentin,
a young student attending school at the St. John of the Cross Carmelite
Convent along with his older brother François (Stanislas Carre de
Malberg). Returning for the start of a new semester in January 1944,
Julien meets Jean Bonnet (Raphel Fejto), one of four new students.
Intelligent and observant, Julien soon notices a number of odd details
about Jean: he doesn't recite a prayer with the other boys during an air
raid; he declines a piece of ham at dinner; he gives sketchy accounts of
his background; when French collaborators visit looking for draft
dodgers, the priests hide him; etc. Looking in one of Jean's books
reveals his secret: he is really Jean Kippeinstein. The two boys
gradually form a bond and Julien slowly awakens to the sense of danger
that his new friend must live with every day. With the war all around
them, will the walls of the convent be enough to keep Jean safe?
Due in large part to his experience working in documentaries, Malle
preferred a realistic approach for the majority of his projects over the
standard conventions of Hollywood-style films. This realistic technique
is ideally suited to the true story of
Au Revoir Les Enfants.
There is no flamboyant camerawork or flashy cutting to call attention to
the director; the emphasis is on the characters and the emotional truth
of the scenes. There are no traditional, contrived movie suspense
sequences, no bathetic sentimentality; tension and pathos are allowed to
grow out of the events naturally. Contributing significantly to the
sense of realism is Malle's gift for evoking specific social milieus.
The world of the boarding school is expertly portrayed in all its detail:
the daily routines, the classes and religious ceremonies, the social
cliques among students, the activities of the staff, the hazing of new
students, etc. We're immersed in the rhythms, the sights, the sounds,
even the sense of geography (the layout of the school, the nearby village
and woods) lived by the main characters, creating a vivid sense of
reality that makes the power of the story feel immediate, even though the
events are decades in the past.
Malle keeps the focus of the story on the main character, Julien Quentin.
(Despite the autobiographical nature of the film, Malle insisted Julien
was not modeled after himself.) It's the story both of a friendship, and
of a gradual awakening to a sense-still limited by a child's
perspective--of the larger world and the consequences of war. At the
beginning of the film, Julien is shown to be bright, bookish and
perceptive, but still fairly immature: he's overly attached to his
mother, he wets his bed and he tells adults he wants to be a priest
because he thinks that's what they want of him. When he first meets Jean
he immediately sees that the new boy is a fellow reader. This should
form a quick bond between them, but instead Julien sticks to the
schoolyard code of hazing new students, telling Jean "Mess with me and
you'll be sorry."
When Julien's perceptiveness and curiosity lead him to the truth about
Jean, his reaction is mixed. He knows that the knowledge gives him some
power over the boy, so in traditional schoolyard fashion he tells Jean
that he knows his secret in a manner that sounds like a thinly-veiled
threat. Julien's deeper reaction is to wonder why this secret should
matter. He is aware of anti-Semitism: Joseph (François Negret), an older
boy who works at the school and trades goods with the students, insults
Julien by calling him "a real Jew," and the local public bathhouse has a
sign prohibiting Jews. He asks his older brother what a Jew is and why
people hate them, but gets an unsatisfactory answer: Jews are people who
don't eat pork, and people hate them because "they're smarter than us"
and "they killed Jesus." None of this makes sense to Julien, who
protests that the Romans killed Jesus, and who certainly can't understand
why not eating pork or being smart should be causes for bigotry. Jean
strikes him as just another boy; there doesn't seem to be any good reason
for hating him. After having been raised in a Catholic school with
concise teachings on right and wrong, Julien is confronted with
real-world adult "morality" that seems devoid of logic or reason. Malle
thus avoids any clumsy speechifying about the evils of anti-Semitism: he
simply presents it from the perspective of a sensitive and intelligent
child and thereby exposes its utter irrationality.
Julien and Jean's friendship is finally cemented during a school treasure
hunt, during which Julien is chased by aggressive older boys and ends up
lost, alone and frightened in the woods. After discovering the treasure,
he comes across a similarly fearful Jean, who also fled from the others.
When they start walking back to the school, a car driven by German
soldiers stops to pick them up, causing Jean to briefly panic and try to
run. Although Julien has difficulty fully grasping Jean's perilous
situation, the feelings of persecution (by the older boys), fear and
isolation in an unfamiliar environment he experiences during the treasure
hunt help him to empathize with the other boy. Another factor that helps
them bond is that Julien also has a secret he does not want his
classmates to discover: he wets his bed. The secret is not comparable to
Jean's, but it helps give Julien a perspective on Jean's situation. (He's
also grateful when Jean learns his secret but doesn't reveal it.) As soon
as Julien is able to set aside the attitudes expected of him by his
schoolmates (don't mix with the new kids) and society (don't mix with
Jews), he can both empathizes with Jean and discover a natural friend
with whom he can share his intellectual passions. Malle's sensitive
depiction of how the relationship between Julian and Jean develops makes
Au Revoir Les Enfants one of the best films about childhood
friendship ever in addition to being a "coming of age" story and an
excellent look at wartime France.
Malle is fortunate to have found two young leads able to handle the
complex roles of Julien and Jean. Gaspard Manesse conveys Julien's many
facets with skill and subtlety: his devotion to his mother, his stoic
façade around some of the other students, his curiosity, his difficulty
in understanding society's anti-Semitism and his compassion for and true
friendship with Jean. Manesse captures the essence of a boy whose
intellectual development is outpacing his emotional development, and who
is making his first tentative explorations of the adult world. As Jean,
Raphael Fejto quietly evokes a fatalistic sense of dread, the consequence
of a boy being forced to live with fear for far too long. A standout
among the supporting cast is François Negret as Joseph. Suffering from a
lame leg, Joseph cannot serve in the army or the resistance, and is
forced to support himself with menial work at the convent, supplemented
by trading with students who also regard him as an outcast. Negret
expertly communicates the boy's false bravado (he boasts of many sexual
conquests) and the seething bitterness that lies just beneath the
surface.
Criterion's disc of
Au Revoir Les Enfants is another superb effort
from the label. The 1.66:1, 16 x 9 enhanced transfer was supervised by
cinematographer Renato Bera, and is an excellent representation of the
film's crisp photography and subdued color palette of wintry
tones-browns, tans, blues, blacks and whites. The French mono soundtrack
is clear and free of noise or distortion. Extras are limited to two
trailers and printed essays by Philip Kemp and Francis J. Murphy. The
film is available by itself or as part of the box set 3 Films by Louis
Malle, which also includes
Le Souffle au Coeur, Lacombe Lucien and
a disc of bonus materials. The bonus disc includes an interview with
biographer Pierre Billard, who discusses (among other things) the true
events that inspired
Au Revoir Les Enfants, an insightful analysis
of the character of Joseph by filmmaker Guy Magen, an interview with
Malle's widow Candice Bergen, vintage audio and TV interviews with Malle,
a Malle filmography and Charlie Chaplin's
The Immigrant, which is
featured in
Au Revoir Les Enfants.
For more information about
Au Revoir Les Enfants, visit
The Criterion Collection. To
order
Au Revoir Les Enfants, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Gary Teetzel
