a haunting a personal recollection

Rating: 9/10 (5 November 2010)

It took Louis Malle over forty years to write and direct this autobiographic coming-of-age story, in which he recalls an extraordinary moment from his childhood in Nazi occupied France when he betrayed, with an involuntary glance, a Jewish classmate attending his Catholic boarding school under an assumed name. The setting is a cloistered adolescent world of petty cruelties, minor triumphs, and a few not-so-childish secrets, with hardly a false note throughout. Even after four decades the details are crystal clear, showing none of the distortions or exaggerations of memory; every virtue of the film is so well balanced that each one is virtually invisible. The story is disarmingly simple and straightforward, and yet in its own restrained, undemonstrative way the final impact is heartbreaking. There is no gunfire, no bloodshed, no violence, but Malle reminds us that sometimes, on an all too personal level, the consequences of warfare are no less lethal for being so quiet.