Beautiful and tragic

Rating: 10/10 (27 April 2010)

I first saw this movie long ago in high school french class when we did a sampling of classic and recent French films. I remembered bits and pieces, but re-watching it recently as an adult, I found this movie to be a real classic.
It's an incredibly unpretentious film, telling without any cinematic fireworks the story of Jean Bonnet (Kippelstein), a young Jew who has been hidden at a boarding school for wealthy Catholic boys, and befriends Julien Quentin. The friendship is portrayed very naturalistically and is charming in its realism, there's nothing profound about it, they just go from being strangers to pretty good friends in a very casual, haphazard way that strikes me as how most people made friends at that age. Much of the movie is episodic, which helps build the characters in a realistic way, and I think a lot of the film's strength is how much time it devotes to building the friendship through interesting little moments. To succeed, any character-driven movie needs to make you care about the characters, and through realism and honesty, "Au Revoir Les Enfants" does just that.
The movie is set against a backdrop of World War 2 and occupied France, and I wonder how French people feel about this movie, it must represent a sad chapter of their history. The movie seems imbued with the gloomy, defeated attitudes that must have been prevalent in the country then, and yet there is a spark of defiance - the core characters do small things to antagonize their occupiers, and in the beautiful conclusion we of course are left with the message that although the events of the times were horrible, the human spirit had the ability to prevail.
"Au Revoir Les Enfants" is a beautiful and tragic work of art. It is one of those great movies that is uplifting (despite telling a sad story) and has something profound and optimistic to say about about the human condition. This one's a winner, pure and simple.