Au Revoir Les Enfants

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants a memoir of the second world war.

Julien is about 13. His mom and dad are wealthy. He goes to private catholic school. It is January 1944.

A new kid enters his class. The kids are rough to him, all the kids are little bastards. Julien is also rough on him but in time the two kids are together here and there and strike up a friendship. Julien snoops through the kid’s stuff and learns he’s really a jew the priest is hiding.

The shared secret brings the boys closer together. But then the Germans come. They get three boys, all the jews, and the priest, and arrest them. Julien waves goodbye to his friend. Later he will hear that his friend and the other two kids both died in Auschwitz; the priest died in another prison. ‘Though 40 years have passed I will never forget that day.’

Nothing remarkable about the filmmaking. The script strings together a series of scenes without too much structure. The main thing is the way the two boys are antagonists rivals and then friends. There are a couple of subplots. A portrait of France in that time.

Very good view of the school kids. No sentimentality. Solid filmmaking with nothing flashy. Decent soundwork for the scenes where the entire track is made up of foley and loops and ambience. One very expressive scene shows the kids playing war games in the woods; Julien and his friend get lost, but find the treasure. But dark comes down and there might be wolves. And the woods are quiet… that’s the scene where all the sound is done in foley and it’s very good, a bit heavy on the foley and looping, but nobody but a filmmaker would notice it.

A very human film. Even the guy who denounces them is quite well drawn and we understand very well why he betrayed them. We even sympathize with him. Like renoir said, ‘everybody has his reasons.’

(written around 28 February 2009)

PS — to read Aki’s translation of this post in Japanese, click here.