The film takes off from a personal experience of the director's. During the 2nd World War, Malle attended a catholic boarding school that secretly housed jewish refugees, and if he had not exactly made friends with the boys, he never forgot the image of one of them being led away by the Gestapo to the concentration camp (this is my assumption, anyway, of how Malle conceptualized the film -- it takes a single image to set the wheel in motion). A few of the themes that adhere to Louis Malle's personal reflections as an adolescent -- the inordinate love for the Mother, the sympathetic cruelty of the Older Brother(s), the rapture for books -- crop up in this film, though in diminished form from his other films, notably Murmur of the Heart. We have, in short, Louis Malle making a private film within the greater spectacle of the 2nd World War, and particularly, within the prepackaged pathos of the Holocaust. I believe this film is popular and much loved and much seen in french classes because it indirectly alludes to the greater harsher world outside of the boarding school and the boys' still nascent reality: the film shows tenderness, firstly, and it is 'significant,' secondly. Malle is a master of intimacy, this we know, and so it comes across as a fortunate piece of work to use the same silences and boyish revelations that make him so adept at filmed introspection, to comment, and ultimately make a statement, on the gross violence, injustice and evils of the Holocaust. As such the film is unpretentious, and therefore makes its bold points in tense but incantatory whispers. The entire set-piece involving the boarding school boys playing a kind of tag war between the blue-ribboned boys and the red-ribboned, in which Malle's alter ego (so I presume), the young, poetic-minded Julien Quentin, finds himself lost in the woods with the jewish boy, Jean Bonnet, aka Jean Kippelstein. The blues and greens of the woods in which they find themselves too deep and without a path back to the school, deepen in color, shadow, and cold, and force the boys to rely on each other, as night descends upon them, creating an atmosphere of unspoiled, inward communion. The startling encounter with the Nazi foot soldiers makes a rough contrast to the closeness and boyish fear shared by the two accidental friends: thus we are given the photo shot of the boys huddled together under a blanket, their pale faces punctured by cold, that serves as the principal cover for Criterion's dvd release.
Despite the poignancy of its scenes, the film seems to me not particularly impressive. If it is the sort of film that it takes millions of dollars and a board of high-brand talent for Hollywood to reproduce but only end up failing to make, through inevitable heavy-handedness, it too is limited to being but a model of learned tonality that sacralizes the emotional life and gives a sense of what could be a much louder, brasher, more obviously politicized film... In sum, Au Revoir Les Enfants teaches Hollywood how to make those kinds of films that it repeatedly lusts after (big everlasting politicized themes, unmistakably personalized touch, small to micro budget), but when compared to his earlier french films, it barely represents that side of him which is originary and seminal.
It is no secret that Malle ended up becoming a Hollywood-sized director, since his talents were duly noted by producers and big studios as being especially variegated and eclectic, but Au Revoir Les Enfants is notable precisely because it was his return not only to France, but to his own inner childhood. After delving wholeheartedly into the inner meaning of America and Americanism (since moving to the States in the late 70s), in such documents as God's Country and And the Pursuit of Happiness, Malle probably felt a nostalgia for his own land, his catholic upbringing, and the recursive images of his childhood. As such, the film, when compared to the ponderousness of his american work -- i.e. Atlantic City, Alamo Bay --, somehow retains the stamp of his earlier french period -- the lightness of touch, the period-specific mannerism -- as if the years he spent making films in the States had never occurred at all. The film's greatest virtue is that it feels of its time, as far removed from the year 1987 (when it was released), as the children are removed from the horrors of Auschwitz, from the war front, and from the ugliness of hardened adult hatred. It could have been made in the 1960s.
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