Goodbye, children. I'll see you soon.

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2011)

"To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, all encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press." – Theodore Dalrymple
Louis Malle's "Au Revoir Les Enfants" tells the tale of a young Jewish child who is sheltered from the Nazis (and Vichy police) by a Catholic school during World War 2. The film is the spiritual sequel to Malle's earlier "Lacombe, Lucian" - another autobiographical tale about a boy sold out to the Nazis - but is directed with much more skill. This is the glossiest and slickest of Malle's films.
The bulk of the film concerns the blossoming friendship between a young French boy and Jewish boy, and their fears of living away from their parents and home. It is along these lines that the film works best, Malle capturing the confusion, fear, vulnerability and wonder of youth. One scene, a school organised treasure hunt in the woods, is powerful.
While the film thinks it is "enlightened" and "liberal", it merely offers another form of anti-Semitism. Malle depicts Jews as cute, lovable, superior and exotic, systematically reversing the sinister venalities of Nazi agitprop. Malle's camera is infatuated with young, Jewish beauty, salivating over the Jewish child and fawning over his "talents", "innocence", "grace" and "allurement". In boot-licking the Jew's preciousness, the film not only suggests that a less attractive non-Jewish child is less worthy of being spared, but partakes in the very same kind of "objectification of humanity" that the Nazis did, such a stance being one of the psychological mechanisms that enabled the Holocaust and continues to fuel knee-jerk anti-Semitism today.
The film is shot in icy greys, whites and blues, and is structured as a series of recollections by a now adult Malle (the tale is partially autobiographical). Malle's camera coddles and sighs over the Jewish boy, and then weeps when the kid is removed, during the film's climax, from the school compound by Nazi soldiers. Interestingly, it is a poor youth who turns the Jewish boy in to the Nazis; working class resentment smoothly misdirected toward society's scapegoats.
8/10 - Worth one viewing.