The Great Movies III

Of course the others pick on the newcomer, and Julien joins in. Sometimes at that age fights are a form of expressing friendship, and often enough they end in laughter. They both love to read. Gradually, through a series of signs so subtle the other boys never pick up on them, Julien learns that Jean is concealing a secret. Is it the way he avoids questions about his family? The fact that he doesn't recite the prayers with everyone else, and skips choir practice? Julien notices that when Jean kneels at the altar rail, the priest quietly passes without giving him a communion wafer. In Jean's locker, Julien finds a book from which the name has not entirely been removed. The name is Kippelstein.

Julien knows almost nothing about Jews. "Why do we hate them?" he asks his older brother, Francois. "They're smarter than we are, and they killed Jesus."Julien doesn't understand: "But it was the Romans who killed Jesus." He does, however, feel some envy after he fails a piano lesson with the pretty Mlle. Davenne (Irene Jacob), and then Jean sits down and begins to play with ease and beauty. From time to time, the single awkward notes of Julien's tortured piano lesson will be heard on the soundtrack, as when Jean gets a better essay score than Julien. When Julien sits for a long time in a bathtub, in closeup, we hear the notes again as the camera focuses on his face. We imagine he is piecing together everything he knows, and deciding to keep Jean's secret.

It is near the end of the war. Marshal Petain's collaborationist French government has lost popularity and an American invasion seems imminent. "Nobody likes Petain anymore," someone says during parents' weekend. Nazis patrol the district but are not always monsters. Julien asks his mother to invite Jean to join them and Francois at lunch, and when an old Jewish man at another table is confronted by French fascists, German officers at another table order them out of the room and tell the old man to continue with his meal.

In the film's most important sequence, Julien is involved in a treasure hunt in a forest of deep shadows, large rock outcroppings, and an ominous early twilight. He gets lost, and it feels a little like Picnic at Hanging Rock. He finds the treasure in a dark, hidden cave, and then he finds Jean. "Are there wolves in this forest?" Jean asks. They encounter a boar, who snuffles at them and waddles away. Walking home after curfew, they are seen by two Germans in a car. Jean begins to run, but the Germans catch both boys, give them a blanket to stay warm and return to them to the school. "You see, we Bavarians are Catholics also," they say.

Yes, but the long day in the forest is the story of Julien's year, the story of lost wandering, surrounded by unnamed dangers. He competes with the other students, is isolated, discovers a secret, and can share it with only one other student, Jean Bonnet. The two boys never talk about Julien keeping Jean's secret; it doesn't need saying. "Are you ever afraid?" Julien asks. "All the time," says Jean.

Au Revoir les Enfants is based on a wartime memory of Louis Malle (1932-95), who attended this very school, le Petit-College d'Avon, which was attached to a Carmelite monastery near Fountainebleau. The school, like many Catholic schools and other organizations, took in Jewish children under assumed names to shelter them from the Nazis; partly as a result, some 75 percent of French Jews survived the war, according to an essay by Francis J. Murphy.

Malle never forgot the day when Nazis raided the Petit-College and arrested three Jewish students and the headmaster (Father Jacques in life, Father Jean in the film). The students and their teachers lined up in the courtyard as the little group was marched off the grounds; the priest looked back at them and said, "Au revoir, les enfants." Goodbye, children. The three boys died at Auschwitz. The priest, whose birth name was Lucien Bunuel, nursed others and shared his rations at the Mauthausen camp, where he died four weeks after the war ended.

I remember the day Au Revoir les Enfants was shown for the first time, at the 1987 Telluride Film Festival. I had come to know Louis Malle a little since a dinner we had in 1972; he was the most approachable of great directors. I was almost the first person he saw after the screening. I remember him weeping as he clasped my hands and said, "This film is my story. Now it is told at last."