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...
© James Travers 2012
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Louis Malle film:
Milou en mai (1990)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.