Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987)
Drama
Starring Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejtö
Directed by Louis Malle
Sometimes, for reasons unbeknownst even to myself, I hear or see of a movie and say to myself, “I will watch that.”
This was one of those movies. It’s certainly not something I would normally chose to watch. It’s something that I’d only really watch, or so I thought, if it appeared on a list. And then I’d undoubtedly whine and complain about it.
So the motivation behind watching this movie is, as yet, unclear.
Julien Quentin and Jean Bonnet find themselves at a Carmelite school for boys in the countryside of France during the Nazi occupation. The two boys forge a tenuous association over their common situation which grows into a real friendship over their love of literature and Julien’s discovery of Jean’s dangerous secret.
The antics of the boys were very reminiscent of another French movie, Les Choristes, a recent movie set only a few years after the culmination of WWII. It’s comforting to know that even in times of fear and death and war, boys will be boys.
I liked the character of Julien in particular. He seems almost half-separated from the world in the movie, always with his head in a book or lost in his own private thoughts. One of my favorite parts of the movie occurs when he says to Bonnet, during the adventure in the woods that would cement their friendship, “Do you realize that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944? Never again?”
That is something that even today, fifteen years older and more than a decade past than that moment, for that character, in that movie, I think about. This very morning. How every moment of every day is entirely new and entirely unique. There will never be another like it, there was never one before it. I thought of that line again as the final subtitles blossomed up on the screen. That moment on one cold January morning may never occur again, but for the character of young Julien, it will never really end either. Malle reminds us that the moments in our life that define us are the ones we cannot let go of.
For Malle, as the movie is supposed to be more autobiographical than not, the moment which defines him is the one in which he saw his childhood stripped from him. He very effectively captures the exact moment when the innocence of the young protagonist, Julien Quentin, is forever lost. But long before that heartbreaking scene, the movie has the feel of something slowly and tragically disappearing. One wonders if ever an innocence such as this has existed in the world because it certainly doesn’t anymore. I wonder if it can.
The movie is beautiful; tragically beautiful, yes, but beautiful nonetheless. It was perfectly complemented by the piano score, and the cool colors and soft-focus Malle chose to shoot in. There were some priceless moments–the older brother giving the German soldiers wrong directions cracked me up. I didn’t expect to laugh during this movie but I did.
When the movie ended, aside from the short epilogue of the narrator, I felt a big cheated. I wanted more. I wanted to know what the brother would do, what Julien would do, what any of them would do. I wanted to know how the events of the movie had changed or would change their own lives. Would Julien grow up to be the missionary in the Congo? Would the events of one cold January morning strengthen his faith or shatter it?
Movie Rating? B
Favorite line(s)?