Better than most French movies

Rating: 8/10 (20 September 2010)

French movies are almost always too slow and boring for American audience tastes. While cinematography is important, French movies are often criticized for their overindulgence in angles without dialog. Finish a French movie and ask yourself, "What did I just watch?" Often times, the only redeeming part of French movies are the actors and actresses who are more than willing to remove their clothes for the audiences.
So how can a 20-year-old Au Revoir Les Enfants keep contemporary American attention? With an amazing script, realistic portrayals of childhood, different perspectives on world history and viewer created tension waiting for heartache as it looms on the horizon.
The story follows Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) leaving Paris after Christmas Break to return to his Catholic boarding school. A new student, Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejtö) joins his class and quickly demonstrates modest intellectual superiority over arrogant Quentin. Refusing to adopt a formulaic childhood movie friendship (animosity, followed by one person helping the other and then a flowering and transcendental relationship), Quentin and Bonnet seesaw between appreciation and apprehension. True to life, there is no single event that cements their friendship and instead several experiences grow the two closer together.
The setting takes place in occupied France during World War II, which is a situation ideal for exploring the sheer range of human experience: trust and betrayal, love and hate, fear and courage, hope and hopelessness. However, the film doesn't try to do overextend itself and simply concentrates on the children. In fact, most of the situations that occur are not understood by Quentin. While he's sitting in class and the camera shows a German soldier asking to confess outside the window, he doesn't even look up from his school work. Then when his math class continues underground after an air raid siren, he nonchalantly ignores the teacher's lesson and reads a different book. When the lights flicker, the children act excited; when the teacher starts praying, the children follow out of habit instead of fear. Even though the audience has evidence the story occurs sometime during the occupation, the only way we can identify the precise year is near the end when the math instructor mentions the start of a Soviet offensive. And since that signals somewhere around six months before Paris is liberated, the hope for a happy ending looms somewhere in the future.
The film proceeds somewhat direction less for a long time. This allows tension to flow from the audiences expectations that something should happen soon, although we're not sure what or how. We mostly watch boys enjoying a sheltered life, oblivious to the dire state of world affairs. The voice over at the end is especially memorable because the free-flowing story has no buildup to a climax and we only recognize that we witnessed the climax when the voice over starts. As the German officer continues calling names, we are led to believe the movie has led us to the names called. But it doesn't – the events are mostly over.
While it can be tedious watching a French movie tiptoe from one isolated incident to another, Au Revoir Les Enfants is absolutely amazing. Seeing children in movies that behave like children (naturally we're not surprised when students relentlessly harass the new kid) authenticates the experience of the characters far beyond the less believable golden heart child befriends new kid and receives rewards for their kindness. Witnessing world history from different eyes will hopefully serve enough interest to consider watching this movie yourself. - Erik Hagen