Au revoir les enfants

Au revoir les enfants

May any of us not recall a moment when we did or said just exactly the wrong thing, irrevocably, irreparably? Instantly after the act was done or the words were spoken we seethe with shame and regret, but what we have done can never be fixed. Such moments are rare, and they happen most often in childhood, before we are taught to think before we do. “Au revoir les enfants” (“Goodbye, Children”) is about such a moment; it is about a brief thoughtless glance that might have cost four people their lives.

The film was written and directed by Louis Malle from a childhood memory. Judging by the tears streaming down his face on the night the film played at Telluride (CO) during Labor Day 1987, he has been hurting from this memory for many years. His story takes place in 1944 at a Catholic boarding school in Nazi-occupied France. Three new students are admitted at the start of a new term and it is clear immediately that they are Jews who have been given new names and identities to hide them from the Nazis.

But Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) does not see this at all. Julien who is supposed to be Malle’s alter ego does not understand all these businesss about Jews and gentiles in a country run by Nazis. All he knows is that he likes one of these boys: Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto), and they become friends.

Jean is an unpopular boy among other students who practice their traditional schoolboy behavior of closing ranks against outsiders. But then again neither is Julien very popular either. The two boys are both somewhat dreamy and thoughtful, preoccupied with themselves and with their imaginations as bright children should be.

Malle’s movie doesn’t contain lots of dramatic incidents.

It doesn’t feel compelled to follow strong plotting leading up to a big finale like “The Lords of Discipline” or other roughly comparable Hollywood films. Instead, it just shows us what these boys do every day. We see the classroom routine, the air-raid drills; we see how each teacher has his own way of dealing with problems of discipline.

Mostly, we get a feeling for the rhythm of the school. Malle said that when he went back to his old boarding school years later, he found that the building had been torn down and the school forgotten. But to a student enrolled in such an institution, its rules and rituals seem timeless, handed down by countless generations and destined to live forever. A schoolboy cannot be expected to know how quickly violence can strike or how evil can change everything.

Julien and Jean play together, study together, look at dirty postcards together. One day one of those cold, early spring days when the shadows seem ominous and there is an unsettling wind in the trees they go exploring in a nearby forest and darkness falls. They get lost, or nearly so; they survive this adventure, too.

They become closer friends. One day Julien accidentally discovers that Jean Bonnet is not his friend’s real name. A few days later, when Julien’s mother comes to visit, he asks Jean to come with them for lunch at a local restaurant, and they witness an anti-Semitic incident as a longtime customer of the inn is identified as Jewish.

That is pretty much all the information Julien gets. It isn’t clear what he knows about Jean or suspects about him. But when Nazis come to the school… There is only one moment in which Julien commits an act that ruins his life forever after. Malle has said that the incident does not exactly parallel what happened in fact; but then the point must be: sometimes, without thinking twice, you do something from which there is no turning back.

Is the film “Au revoir les enfants” only about guilt? Not at all: it is constructed very subtly so that we see that anyway Julien only half knew what was going on. It wasn’t as if he did know absolutely that Jean was Jewish; more like he had lots of information which he had never quite put together and then suddenly understood everything.

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