Drawn as it was from a boyhood incident in wartime France that would haunt him his entire life, it's not surprising that Au Revoir, Les Enfants (1987) should be largely regarded as the most personal and resonant effort from director Louis Malle's distinguished body of work. Intelligently and believably played by its young amateur principals, the film offers a credible, unsentimental portrait of adolescent friendship, and a wrenching study of how the abstract horrors of the Nazi occupation became all too immediate for the director's surrogate/protagonist.

Malle's narrative commences in January 1944, when 12-year old Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) is being packed off from his Paris home to resume his studies at St. Croix, an exclusive Carmelite boarding school in the Ile de France. By and large, the privileged, intellectually precocious Julien maintains a contemptuous distance from the bulk of his classmates. It's not long into the semester, however, when the headmaster Pere Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud) unexpectedly introduces three new boys to the school, including the contemplative Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto). While initially regarding the newcomer with hostility, Julien comes to recognize a kindred spirit in Jean's native intelligence and outsider posture.

While events begin to forge a tentative bond between the boys, Julien remains piqued regarding Jean's vague and inconsistent accounts of his family life. His rummaging through Bonnet's belongings leads to the discovery that "Jean Bonnet" is in fact Jean Kippelstein, and that he and the other new inductees are refugee Jews whom Pere Jean has sought to covertly sequester from the Nazis. Although Jean is enraged when Julien confronts him with the truth, the incident is shortly forgotten, and the two go on with their lives.

All changes for the worst when a vengeful expelled student (Francois Negret) goes to the Gestapo with his beliefs about Pere Jean's activities. When the SS bursts into the classroom, all it takes is a furtive glance from Julien to Jean to spur the soldiers into leading him away, and Julien can only watch with crushing regret as Pere Jean and those he sought to shield are lead off to their fates.

In Philip French's definitive interview Malle on Malle, the director was candid about the lifelong impact of the factual circumstances that had inspired him. "For years I just didn't want to deal with it, but it had an enormous influence on the rest of my life...It's hard to explain, but it was such a shock that it took me several years to get over it, to try to understand it--and, of course, there was no way I could understand it. What happened was so appalling and so fundamentally opposed to all the values that we were being taught, that I concluded that there was something wrong with the world, and I started becoming very rebellious."

As to the two young unknowns cast to shoulder his story, Malle told French, "I knew even before I started writing the screenplay that the film would succeed or fail on the casting... I hesitated for a while between [Manesse] and another boy, but there was something about Gaspard: he was like quicksilver, he was so alive, very sharp and insolent. Arrogant and shy at the same time. When we started reading with him I could see he was on pitch... The boys very quickly became so confident, they seem to master the technical difficulties of film acting so easily, that sometimes I had to be hard on them because it was almost too easy for them," the filmmaker stated.

Au Revoir, Les Enfants met with almost universal praise upon its release, and Malle wholly anticipated that the wave of acclaim would culminate with its obtaining the 1987 Oscar® for Best Foreign Film, so much so that he was personally devastated when the prize was given instead to Babette's Feast (1987). The film may not have garnered Malle the Academy Award he had always coveted, but it is and will remain one of the touchstones of a remarkable cinematic legacy.

Producer: Louis Malle
Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Cinematography: Renato Berta
Film Editing: Emmanuelle Castro
Art Direction: Willy Holt
Music: Camille Saint-Saens
Cast: Gaspard Manesse (Julien Quentin), Raphael Fejto (Jean Bonnet), Francine Racette (Mme Quentin), Stanislas Carre de Malberg (Francois Quentin), Philippe Morier-Genoud (Pere Jean), Francois Berleand (Pere Michel).
C-105m. Letterboxed.

by Jay S. Steinberg