Goodbye, Children (Au Revoir Les Enfants) (1987)

 

Au revoir les enfants

In high school (or the Danish equivalent) I had two years of French classes. We watched two movies in those classes: “Le Boucher”, which I did not like and “Au revoir les enfants”. I remember it working very powerfully on me and although I have not watched it again in all these intervening years, I got exactly the same feeling watching it two days ago.

In German occupied France, Julien (Gaspard Manesse), our narrator, is a 12-year-old student at a Catholic boarding school for children of rich parents. This is a boys-only school in a monastery in a small, countryside town, a pocket of life almost detached from a world at war. Yet, the war insinuates itself into the school in small ways. There is a rampant black market, the school is underheated and undersupplied, bomb raids send everybody into the shelters and one day three new children arrive. One of boys is called Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtő) and he starts in Julien’s class.

At first Julien and Jean are rivals. They appear to have similar interests, but Jean is simply better at it than Julien, so he sees him as an intrusion. Jean is however a nice boy, and the rivalry becomes a, first grudgingly, then heartfelt friendship. Julien discovers that Jean has a secret. First of all, his name is not Bonnet at all but Kippelstein, he does not want to eat pork and his claim to be a protestant harmonizes poorly with the strange ceremonies he performs at night (for Shabat). This is where Julien starts wondering what a Jew is and why it is that some people, especially the Germans do not like them.

Things come to a head when the scullion boy, Joseph (François Négret), the prügelknappe of the school, is fired for black marketeering and takes his revenge on the school.

It has been a few days now since I watched the movie and in that time, I have spent a lot of energy trying to formulate what it is I like so much about this movie. The obvious answer is the drama and the heartbreaking ending, but I think it is a lot more than that. Louis Malle, the director whose childhood story this also is, manages to bring us very close to these boys. We understand them, especially Julien, and this life at the boarding school feels very real. The children are neither better nor worse than any other children. The monks are not caricatures, but real people and the effort to create normality in an otherwise broken world for the children, makes them almost heroic in their small way. I think it is this sensation that gets through so well and immerses the viewer into the story.

When disaster strikes, it is both unsentimental and mechanic and also earthshattering. If you can sit through that without horror and a tear in your eye, you are simply made of stone.

The story is largely true, Louis Malle went to a school like this when he was the age of Julien and witnessed three boys and the head of the school, Pere Jacques, Pere Jean in the movie (Philippe Morier-Genoud), being taken away by the Gestapo. The interaction between Julien and Jean is invented, but life on the boarding school feels, and probably is, very real. It is this authenticity that is the great strength of this movie.

“Au revoir les enfant” was nominated to two Academy Awards (Best Foreign language and Best Original Screenplay), but did not win either. It did win a gazillion other prices around the world and found its way into classrooms the world over. I understand why. Beside being a fundamentally good movie, it also puts faces and people on the lost millions in the Holocaust. We cry for Jean Kippelstein and we understand the loss for Julien Quentin.

Highly recommended.

Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

Adventures in Babysitting

I am introducing a new category here on my blog. It is called “My wife wants me to see this”. As I am progressing up through the eighties, my wife supplies me with a lot of ideas for movies to watch. So many in fact that she has now earned her own category. It is still me who watch and review the movie, but they are her picks.

The first entry on that list is “Adventures in Babysitting”.

Chris Parker (Elisabeth Shue) is a 17 year old high school student who earns a bit of money doing babysitting. When her boyfriend cancels on her, she instead accepts a job sitting for Brad (Keith Coogan) and Sara (Maia Brewton). Brad is 15 years old and has a crush on Chris. His friend Daryl (Anthony Rapp), who joins the party, finds there is a striking similarity between Chris and Playboy’s March centrefold. Sara is much younger and a daredevil who idolizes Thor (god or superhero).

The evening quickly takes a left turn when Chris’ friend, Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), calls in panic from a bus station downtown Chicago. She has run away from home but regrets and wants Chris to pick her up. With the children in tow, Chris drives from the suburbs into town. This turns out to be quite an odyssey.

Through a number of strange coincidences, a puncture turning into being caught in a shooting, then in a car theft, to being prisoners of a local gang who steals muscle-cars and distribute them nationwide. They make a spectacular escape, but Daryl, wanting a replacement for his lost Playboy magazine, steals the gangster’s copy. This pisses them off. Not because they like the magazine but because it is filled with incriminating notes of their dealings. Now Chris must keep track of her charges, find Brenda and avoid getting caught by gangsters.

“Adventures in Babysitting” taps into a number of overlapping genres that were very popular in the eighties and early nineties. There is the “crazy things happen with the babysitter” theme as well as the “Children/teens from the suburbs encountering the menacing city” and of course the chase movie. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Uncle Buck” and “Home Alone” are all in this family of movies. They make up the quintessential eighties family movie and that is exactly where we are with “Adventures in Babysitting”. The only surprise is that John Hughes is not involved in it. And that I never watched if before my wife made me aware of it.

There is an innocence to “Adventures in Babysitting” that is very eighties (and also unmistakeably Disneyesque). With a sole exception (Sara walking on the outside of a skyscraper) it never gets truly dangerous and the bad guys have a tendency to fumble. The teenagers skirt the topic of sex, but stops short of anything actually happening. That may sound boring and once you start noticing, a little annoying, but in this eighties fantasy it gets away with it, the same way “Home Alone” got away with the horrible nightmare of a small child forgotten at home over the holidays. Sometimes the fantasy elements takes the story off on some strange tangents, such a the blues bar scene or the strange tow-truck guy, but it works because it is an adventure and through the children’s eyes everything here is an adventure anyway.

It is difficult not to be charmed by “Adventures in Babysitting”. It is not top quality and it does venture into a lot of cliché’s and completely unlikely coincidences, but it is also fun and if you, like me, love thar eighties vibe, then it is difficult to be hard on this movie. It is a good time in the sofa Sunday afternoon. And Elisabeth Shue was a big thing back then.

 

     

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

 

Good Morning, Vietnam

Is it possible to make a comedy on the backdrop of the Vietnam War? Today I suppose the answer is “Why not?”, but in the eighties the Vietnam War was still a touchy subject and a comedy in that setting might well press any number of wrong buttons. Yet this is the tightrope “Good Morning, Vietnam” tries to walk and although you can sense how it tries not to be insensitive, it works decently well.

The story is based on a real radio host, Adrian Cronauer, played in the movie by Robin Williams, who was a big thing on the radio waves in Vietnam in 1965. This apparently is also about as far the true story goes. The movie’s Cronauer lands in a radio studio where half the staff, including Cronauer’s assistant Edward Garlick (Forest Whitaker), is wildly supportive of Cronauer’s irreverent style, while the other half, including Cronauer’s immediate superiors Steven Hauk (Bruno Kirby) and Phillip Dickerson (J.T. Walsh), are vehemently opposed to Cronauer.

And yes, Cronauer is a riot. One thing is his choice of music, but it is what he does in between that sets him apart. Williams was given free reign to just ramble away and he took the opportunity and knocked it out of the park. Cronauer soon learns that while his style causes some opposition among the conservative staff, there are news he simply is not allowed to use, which happens to be anything relevant to the G.I.s in Vietnam. Cronauer balks at that and tries to find ways around it. Half the comedy of the movie is Williams doing his thing, while the other half is the reactions from Dickerson and, especially, Hauk. Hauk considers himself a comedian, but when Cronauer gets suspended and Hauk takes over, it is hilariously evident that Hauk is an embarrassment, not least when he tries to argue that polka goes down very well with a certain segment of the listeners.

Outside the radio studio, Cronauer meets the reality of Vietnam. That is where the comedy largely disappears and the movie runs with a different message. Cronauer meets the crude attitude of American soldier to the local population on the local bar, and he befriend some locals at an English class, especially a brother, Tuan (Tung Thanh Tran), and a sister, Trinh (Chintara Sukapatana) who open his eyes to some harsh realities.

“Good Morning, Vietnam” takes place in a realistic universe where some characters may be slightly on the side of caricatures but with enough verisimilitude that we accept them. This means that Cronauer is a funny man in a very much not funny setting. The effect of this clash is both humorous and extra tragic and it gives an unexpected depth to the movie, but may also pull the rug from under the levity. Jokes are not so funny when people are dying, but maybe so much more necessary.

Robin Williams is so central to “Good Morning, Vietman” that it largely stands or falls with his performance. Luckily, Willams is in great shape in this movie, and it catapulted him into stardom. I do not always find Robin Williams funny, there is this particular edge to his comedy I am not fond of, but here it works very well. It may be the setting that works for him here, perhaps.

A curious detail is that most Vietnam movies of the eighties show plenty of explosions and soldiers, but very little of Vietnam itself. “Good Morning, Vietnam” is shot in Thailand and the local Vietnamese are actually Thai, but at least it is trying to present the country and the people it is supposed to take place in. The result is that Cronauer, representing the western visitor, is surprised to find how little he knows about the country in which he is fighting and how unwelcome his army actually is.

“Good Morning, Vietnam” has moments that works fantastic as comedy and moments of depth, but also seem nervous at trying to hit the right balance. There is a feeling of driving with the hand on the brakes, but it may be that it is this consideration th