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.
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