France, World War II. Julien Quentin (12) is unwillingly sent by his mother to a rural Catholic boarding school for boys. The daily routine is underwhelming: they study math, until they are interrupted by air raids and have to hide in a bunker; food rations are scarce, whereas the rich kids exchange their food for cigarettes thanks to Joseph, who is punished for it when this is discovered. A new kid is brought in the school, Jean Bonnet. Julien discovers a notebook in Jean's locker, confirming Jean's real last name is Kippelstein, meaning the latter is Jewish. One day, Nazi officials enter the school and arrest Jean, three other boys and the priest who was hiding that they were Jews. The arrested people are deported, and die in concentration camps.
Louis Malle waited for a long time unil he thought he was mature enough to film this painful autobiographical story from his childhood—he only made three more films after this—yet the wait was worth it, since the critics rewarded his "Au revoir les enfants" with acclaim and recognition. "Au revoir" is very good, yet still a little bit overrated. It has a great, fantastic, very touching and intense finale, yet the entire story up to it is at times bland, sometimes even boring, with routine episodes from the boarding school and numerous episodic characters who do not stand out as especially memorable, except for the two main protagonists, Julien and Jean. It is stronger as a therapy—for Malle's own torment and guilt of his passivity as a child, yet, when you are a kid, you cannot make such a difference, anyway—and humanistic message, yet weaker as a cinematic achievement. Presented without music, with minimalism and a realist narrative, "Au revoir" is deliberately de-dramatized, and thus not even the arrest and deportation of the kids by the Nazi officials creates any suspense, instead just presenting the events as something that just happened. Malle is wise enough to avoid depicting the myth of "innocent youth", instead choosing a more realistic description of 12-year old boys, who are starting to dominate each other, or are fighting, bullying, being vulgar or talking about sex in 1001 Nights, with his alter ego Julien standing as an intellectual who tries to "endure" this stage of his life, even when it is not that easy (the sequence where he wakes up during the night after having a "wet dream", and has to clean the stain from his sheet). A problem is that Julien and Jean do not bond until the end, when they become friends for only some 10 minutes before the finale, and thus their relation is not that strong, yet Malle was maybe just being honest about this episode, refusing to glamorize or distort it into a typical mainstream film that some have wished. It is both a small glimpse of the Holocaust and a coming-of-age study about loss: in the final close up of the film, Julien has grown up.
Grade:+++
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