about friendship first, the horror of the German occupation (very close) second

Rating: 10/10 (30 November 2009)

Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants goes head to head with Truffaut's the 400 Blows to creating *the* French film about what's real, and sometimes dark and terrifying, about childhood. Both films have conflicted young protagonists who are just starting to become teenagers, and faced with a question: how to live, or just react, in the world around them? In the case of Malle's film, however, there's a lot more going on in the personal side of things than just an outsider/petty criminal. It's about a boy who finds a friend, without really going out of his way, and then that friendship ending because of something that neither boy can control since one happens to be a Jew. The film doesn't start as some haunting elegy to youth, but by the end it becomes just that, and about the very crucial act of remembering.
Indeed, one of the many strengths of Malle's masterpiece (his best film perhaps alongside Murmur of the Heart, also about a boy) is that it's so carefully remembered from forty years past and brought to life, as if it were happening today, at least emotionally. It's set in a Catholic all-boy's school in 1944 where Julien Quentin is off to learn and be away from his mom and dad, the latter he barely ever sees. There's a new boy, Jean Bonnet, who is attending the school, and immediately (perhaps predictably) he's picked on and bullied, though nothing too terrible that he can't bounce back. He somehow connects with Jean over the coming months, as they become stranded in the woods during a treasure hunt, one teaches the other piano, and Julien sees something rather startling: Jean praying at night with candles out and in a language he doesn't understand. Something else he discovers is his real name- Jean Kippelstein- and that he's a Jew. He has to asks someone first what a Jew is, the response from one of his school-mates simply "A Jew doesn't eat pork."
Malle observes the ways of children without interfering with them, but at the same time creating an atmosphere that is so real that the hangups with melodrama never get in the way. The little dramas of an everyday school-boy life, or just the side-issues at the school (trading objects black-market style, sneaking around a copy of Arabian Nights, keeping up with playing be it on stilts in the playground), or, as it turns out, Julien's own little problems. What Malle does is subtle but extraordinary; by letting the story unfold in this gradual style, with little events building upon one another, a whole picture emerges of the story of these two friends set against this backdrop of Catholic highs and lows, French occupation by the Nazis, and the hint that there may be more than one Jew at the school - one where anti-semitism is noticed but not well experienced. We don't get a full dose of this reality until the scene at a restaurant, where Julien, Jean and Julien's family see it first-hand.
There is a message Malle wants to convey of course, about the ultimate horror of the Nazi regime on good people, some innocent and some trying to do the right thing by hiding others, and we see this particularly in the climax of the story when the Germans come to the school to sniff out any/all Jewish refugees. But this isn't precisely paramount for Malle, or rather it's not the full reason one senses why he made the film and why it's so personal. It's because he knew these people, and that it's about friends and being cared for and being in a bond like the one Julien and Jean have. I wondered going in to the film if it would be more conventional, that it would be about Julien having to hide this secret from the other kids and something building to a point of Jean being found out.
It doesn't work like that, really, except that Malle throws in a hint of existential turmoil: when asked in the class who is Jean Kippelstein Julien, who is the only one who knows, turns his head ever so briefly to Jean, but it's enough to signal the German as to who he is. What's so clever, and just devastating, about this is that it's not Julien's fault, ultimately, if Jean were to be caught, since as it turns out the school is turned upside down for anyone, and eventually three are brought out of the school and sent to Auschwitz. But, by the look on Julien's face, caught in a grip of tragedy, he feels in this moment as an adolescent as if it is his fault. Au revoir les enfants is never forced dramatically and all of its acting and scenes until the last ten minutes are so unforced that its ending is all the more crushing to the soul. It's a heart-rending, powerfully directed portrait of youth, in its ups and downs, and a year that must never be forgotten - not a moment.