Au revoir les enfants
Goodbye, Children
Louis Malle (1987)
The climax to Au revoir les enfants takes place on a January morning in 1944. In German-occupied France, Gestapo officers descend on a Carmelite boarding school whose pupils include three Jewish boys, kept in hiding through the good offices of the school’s head, Père Jean, and his colleagues. The three boys, along with Père Jean, are eventually led away. Text on the screen explains that all four died, the boys in Auschwitz and Père Jean in Mauthausen. The film’s last words are spoken in voiceover by the man that the film’s protagonist – eleven-year-old Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) – became. The voice tells us that, although forty years have passed since that January morning, he will remember every second of it until the day he dies. In the winter of 1943-44, Louis Malle, born in 1932, was a pupil in a Catholic boarding school near Fontainebleau and witnessed virtually the same events that Au revoir les enfants dramatises. Whether or not it’s Malle’s actual voice speaking the closing lines, it seems fair to assume this picture meant a great deal to him. It was certainly one of his most successful movies in terms of prizes won and box-office receipts. It’s also far below Malle’s best.
To be fair, he attempts something doubly difficult in Au revoir les enfants. First, the film’s central relationship is between two children – Julien and Jean Bonnet, one of the Jewish boys (Jean’s real surname is Kippelstein); Malle therefore relies heavily on young and inexperienced players. He’d done so before, of course – in Zazie in the Métro (1960), Murmur of the Heart (1971), Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Pretty Baby (1978). In all four of those cases, though, child or novice performers co-starred with experienced actors; in Au revoir les enfants the adults are in strictly supporting roles. Second, the episode that culminates in the Gestapo’s arrest of Père Jean[1] and the three boys, accounts for less than fifteen minutes of the total (104-minute) running time. These final scenes are, understandably, the film’s raison d’être: the real events they reconstruct made an indelible impression on Malle. But you also feel their overwhelming importance in the story he tells in more negative ways. For the most part, he recreates life in the school competently yet perfunctorily. Good supplementary details – like Julien’s elder brother, François (Stanislas Carré de Malberg), amiably misdirecting ‘Kraut’ soldiers whenever they need help navigating the school grounds – are few and far between. Almost anything not directly connected to the often uneasy friendship of Julien and Jean (Raphaël Fejtő) – and to the latter’s true identity and perilous situation – has a makeweight quality.
It’s a matter of opinion how much of the friendship is invention on Malle’s part. According to his Wikipedia entry, one of the Jewish boys arrested at his Fontainebleau school was ‘his close friend’. According to Pauline Kael, reviewing the film on its original release, ‘One of the Jewish boys was in Malle’s class, but Malle didn’t get to know him well and didn’t realize that he was Jewish’. Whichever of these is correct (if either), Au revoir les enfants gives a melodramatic, unconvincing account of how Julien first gets wind of Jean’s religion. Late one night, Julien wakes to see Jean, whose bed is next to his in the dormitory, standing in prayer, having lit candles and donned a skull cap – an improbably risky strategy in a crowded dorm. Gaspard Manesse and Raphaël Fejtő acquit themselves well enough during incidents like the school treasure hunt that turns into a scary twilight adventure and helps create a bond between the boys. (It’s ironically effective that Julien and Jean, lost on the treasure hunt, are returned safely to school by German soldiers.) It works too – as a means of giving the pair something in common – that they’re made fun of by their classmates because both are bookish. Elsewhere, though, Malle doesn’t give the young leads sufficient means of bringing their characters’ relationship to life.
The film’s opening scene takes place on the platform of a Paris railway station, where Mme Quentin (Francine Racette) is seeing her two sons off to boarding school. She barely speaks to François, except to scold him for smoking a cigarette: it’s all about her and Julien, so unhappy at parting from his mother that he petulantly announces that he hates her. She then assures him that ‘I’ll miss you every moment – I’d like to dress up as a boy and join you: I’d see you at school every day – it would be our secret’. These words and the long embrace between mother and younger son during which they’re spoken naturally bring to mind Murmur of the Heart, another semi-autobiographical Malle film, but Francine Racette has none of Lea Massari’s warmth or charm: Julien’s mother is portrayed here and later in the film as chilly, snobbish and implicitly anti-Semitic. And Malle pushes too hard to show Julien as pampered and privileged. His hair, compared with that of the other boys (including his brother), is conspicuously styled.
During a parents’ day at the school, Mme Quentin takes her two sons to a restaurant. At Julien’s request, Jean sits at the Quentins’ table. It’s no surprise that his own parents are conspicuous by their absence but so too is M Quentin. When François asks if his factory owner father is still a Pétain supporter, his mother retorts that ‘No one is any more’. Right on cue, Milice officers arrive to harass an elderly Jewish diner, a customer at the restaurant of many years’ standing, and order him out – until a Wehrmacht officer at a table near the Quentins’ tells the ‘Collabos’, as François calls them, to leave, which they reluctantly do. While this is going on, Malle cuts repeatedly to Jean’s and Julien’s faces, frightened and uncomprehending respectively. Once the Milice have left, Julien asks his mother, ‘Aren’t we Jewish?’, mentioning some branch of the family in particular. Mme Quentin is appalled by the suggestion and insists the relatives in question are devout Catholics, adding she has nothing against Jews though she’d be happy to see Léon Blum hanged (presumably for his socialism rather than his Judaism). After the Wehrmacht officer has ordered the Milice out, she gives him a respectful-verging-on-flirtatious look; when she then tells her sons the officer’s action proves that some Germans are decent, François says the intervention was designed only to impress her. His mother lightly pooh-poohs the suggestion yet seems almost flattered by it. The sustained emphasis on Mme Quentin in this scene means that she emerges as its unlikely chief villain. Was that really Malle’s intention?
Among the younger actors, Stanislas Carré de Malberg outshines the main boys, not least (though not only) because François is a relatively well-conceived character. Louis Malle may be able to see his younger self in his alter ego Julien but Gaspard Manesse is rarely expressive. Raphaël Fejtő’s Jean is a clichéd and queasy conception of what it means to be Jewish – exotic looking, brainy, a gifted musician. (Malle’s admiring treatment of Jean reminded me of news reports about murdered children which inform us that friends and family remember them as thoroughly delightful – as if we wouldn’t deplore their death without being told that.) François, who’s meant to be sixteen or seventeen, is at least given some coherent human detail. He’s robustly anti-German and anti-collaborationist. He’s interested in the opposite sex and prone to sweeping chauvinist statements about women. Carré de Malberg plays him with refreshing wit. François is particularly interested in the young female pianist at a school concert – a cameo role that marked the screen debut of Irène Jacob, who went on to bigger screen roles than any other cast member. According to Wikipedia and IMDb, Gaspard Manesse moved into music and Raphaël Fejtő behind the camera; Stanislas Carré de Malberg, although he has quite a few more acting credits than either, is probably best known now as a co-writer of The Bélier Family (2014), the French film that inspired Sian Heder’s CODA (2021).
The film’s busiest actor in subsequent years, though not in lead roles, appears to have been François Négret, as Joseph, the lame boy who helps out in the school kitchens and eventually shops Père Jean to the Gestapo, in revenge for being sacked for minor black marketeering. I don’t know if this character and plot element derive from Malle’s own experience but they feel more like a re-working of Lacombe, Lucien, in which the young rustic Lucien, rejected for membership of the French Resistance, gets its own back by turning quisling. Joseph’s treachery is revealed in the course of the climactic Gestapo raid for which Au revoir les enfants has been marking time. This is the highlight that it needs to be, despite Peter Fitz’s rather overdoing the suave brutality of Müller, the Gestapo leader. Julien’s inadvertent betrayal of his friend – Müller catches Julien’s anxious glance at Jean across the classroom – is a fine moment. Another is the formal handshakes Jean gives Julien and others just before he and his Jewish schoolfellows – Dupré (Damien Salot) and Négus (Arnaud Henriet) – are rounded up. The parting words of the headmaster, as he too is escorted from the school grounds, provide the film’s title. (It’s usually referred to by its original French name even in the Anglophone world.) Philippe Morier-Genoud’s bony gravitas as Père Jean is impressive but Au revoir les enfants as a whole is not. Until the closing stages, Louis Malle’s strong personal investment in the material thwarts his film-making imagination.
20 September 2023
[1] The headmaster’s real-life inspiration, Père Jacques de Jésus, according to Wikipedia, ‘died shortly after [Mauthausen] was liberated by the US Army, having refused to leave until the last French prisoner was repatriated. Forty years later, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, granted Père Jacques the title of Righteous Among the Nations’.