Au Revoir Les Enfants is good, not great

Rating: 7/10 (7 September 2008)

In 1987, Louis Malle, after a run of American produced films that worked (My Dinner With Andre, Atlantic City) and failed (Pretty Baby, Crackers), decided to return to his roots and write and produce a small budget French film, Au Revoir Les Enfants (Goodbye, Children) about a supposedly true experience he had as a child, in Vichy France, toward the end of World War Two, at a privileged French boarding school. Although Malle has always claimed the incident to be true, despite changing details of it in retellings, and dramatically for the screen, while others have claimed he was simply telling a good story, neither claim's veracity nor lack has a thing to do with whether or not the story and film work as stand alone works of art. They do, but not nearly as well as the film's greatest champions insist.
The tale is rather simple- in the winter of 1943-44 (December and January) the Malle stand in character, a twelve year old boy, befriends one of four Jewish boys that a Roman Catholic headmaster allows to stay at the private school, to save their lives. Their friendship is slow but realistic in budding, but then the Gestapo comes to the school, rounds up the Jewish boys- save one who escapes, and the headmaster, Father Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud), and the final shot is of the Malle stand-in watching his friend, and the others, being carted off to the death camps, as the school is closed, and Malle, in voice-over, reveals their fates. Overall, while Au Revoir Les Enfants is a good film, indeed, arguably a very good film, it is too straightforward, one dimensional, and not that daring, to come close to true greatness. Yet, mere excellence in a film that could be more is often more frustrating than watching a piece of garbage, because there are moments when one can say, 'If the director only did this,' 'If the screenwriter only did that,' etc. Yes, the film, like almost all Holocaust films, did well at awards time, getting two Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language film and Best original screenplay, it won the Golden Lion award at the 1987 Venice Film Festival, and swept up seven awards at the César Awards- France's Oscars, including Best Director, Best Film and Best Writing, among other honors, but honors do not make up for the 'could'a, should'a, would'a' feeling one is left with after a film like this. And, unlike Chinese food, such leftover pangs do not demand a second helping. Thus, Malle's film is what it is, a good- but not great, meal, served at a restaurant (Holocaust art) that one should only eat at sparingly, so whatever pungency it packs stays on the tongue longer, after its real flavor has faded, and the remembered taste seems all the more delicious.